Every year worldwide, 500,000 women die owing to complications from childbirth. Of these, 10% are in Nigeria. A Californian health sciences student, Evelyn Castle, is doing something about it through an initiative called e-Health Nigeria and an ‘Instant EMR’ she is introducing. A visionary young woman…
“Nigerians record everything on paper. Everything is written down, but once it is written down it is not used. How useful is information written on logbooks when hundreds of women come in to a clinic? By the time it would take to retrieve these women’s medical cards, half of them would be out of the hospital or already dead…
…the Internet, and cell phone calls, are very expensive. But we sat down and thought about what the biggest challenges were and created an instant electronic medical records system (EMR) consisting of solar-powered laptops that last 10 hours on one battery and solar-powered cell phones that link with EMR. When community health care workers go into rural villages they have patient information on the phones.” Evelyn has just received a scholarship from the Donald A. Strauss Public Service Scholarship Foundation to help her continue her work.
More information here.
e-HealthNigeria website.