hsojseven/zambiaEHR

EHR for my trips to Chongwe Zambia, using VistA and YottaDB # zambiaEHR EHR for my trips to Chongwe Zambia, using VistA and YottaDB Some backstory, when I was 16 I went on a missions trip to Zambia to work in a rural clinic in Chongwe. The clinic was mostly focused on doing cataract surgery for those who could not afford it, as a normal surgery costs anywhere from $800 to $2000 or can be simply impossible since lenses are not easy to get a hold of there. My task this first trip was to do paperwork and ensure that there was no backups so we could keep our number of surgeries as high as possible (we did 105 that year). This sparked something in me because we spent nearly 14 hours a day doing government required paperwork for only 20 some patients. I decided that my skills in computing and IT could be useful for increasing efficiency and also reducing the number of errors per sheet. After the next two years I managed to absorb many more clinic roles, to where now I an in charge of basically everything but the surgery itself. All of this so I could learn how to impliment something that works for the people over there as well as for the many visiting doctors and nurses. The end goal for this project is to implement this EHR in the rural clinic in Chifundo and slowly grow it out into other nearby clinics after some years of testing and refinement. The end goal though is to team up with local expert in these clinics and use the power of data to help reduce the number of acute illnesses in the first place. An interesting fact about rural Africa is that generally speaking, people have food enough to survive as long as many americans. The major diference is that they have no health care, so they tend to suffer from acute illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, and many eye diseases. The main reason people suffer from these illnesses is that they are simply not caught soon enough, but with an EHR, it could be possible to identify these peoblems well before they become debilitating and help keep people working and enjoying life. The …