HST.184 Health Information Systems to Improve Quality of Care in Resource-Poor Settings
View the course page to see the syllabus and readings.
A recent article in Health Affairs looks at studies on eHealth effectiveness between July 2007 - Feburary 2010 and finds that 92% had positive conclusions about eHealth's overall effect.
Class 1: Health Care in the Developing World
Lecturer: Joia Mukherjee, Medical Director, Partners in Health
Objective: Provide an overview of the medical illnesses, the status of health care, and common human resource limitations in developing countries. Understand health inequities and the social determinants of health
Class 2: Health Information Systems in Resource-Poor Environments
Lecturer: Hamish Fraser, Director of Informatics and Telemedicine, Partners in Health
Objective: To provide a background on health information systems that have been implemented in developing countries and the evidence on their impact
Class 3: Overview of Quality Improvement
Lecturer: Leo Celi, Project Lead - Sana
Objective: Assess the scope of current problems with the quality in health care and establish definitions and framework for thinking about quality of care
Class 4: Operations Management at the Front Lines
Lecturer: Martin Were, Assistant Professor of Medicine, and Knowledge Informatics & Translation Indiana University
Objective: To evaluate the performance of operating units, understand why they perform as they do, and design new or improved operating procedures and systems
Class 5: Process Improvement Theory and Application
Lecturer: Brandon Bennett, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Objective: Understand the methods used for improving process quality
Class 6: Goal Directed Research for Effective Health Information Systems
Lecturer: Evan Pankey
Objective: Learn to frame the research problems; learn where good ideas come from; and how to synthesize solutions
Class 7: Innovation and Adoption of New Practices
Lecturer: Jonathan Jackson, Founder and CEO of Dimagi
Objective: Examine principles of innovation and the adoption of new practices that can guide the design of successful quality improvement projects
Class 8: Checklists
Lecturer: Alvin Kwok, Surgeon, WHO Safe Surgery Saves Lives Initiative
Priya Agrawal, Obstetrician, WHO Making Pregnancy Safer Initiative
Objective: To understand how checklists improve safety and how they are used; to recognize some of the similarities and differences in improving quality of care in different settings
Class 9: Evaluating Process and Outcome Metrics
Lecturer: Lisa Hirschhorn, MD MPH,
Associate Director of International Monitoring and Evaluation, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School,
Senior Clinical Advisor, HIV/AIDS, JSI Research and Training Institute
Objective: Learn how to design a measurement approach to systematically measure dimensions of quality in clinical care systems
Class 10: Evaluating Process and Outcome Metrics
Lecturer: Pedro Delgado
Objective: Learn how to design an evaluation study with appropriate clinical and economic outcomes
Class 11: Organizational Change - Positive Deviance
Lecturer: Jessica Haberer, Research Scientist, Harvard Initiative for Global Health
Objective: Understand how to design and lead systems changes to achieve quality improvement within a heath-care organization
Class 12: Value-chain Analysis in Healthcare
Lecturer: Anjali Sastry, Executive Director, Global Health Delivery Project
Objective: Learn how to perform value chain analysis in health care and discuss ways it has been applied in developing countries
Class 13: Organizational Change - Lean Sigma
Lecturer: Andrew Kanter, Director of Health Information Systems/Medical Informatics Millennium Villages Project
Objective: Discuss the application of management models drawn from production industries to health-care delivery.
Class 14: Collaborative Change and Wrap-Up
Lecturer: Chaitali Sinha, Program Officer, International Development Research Centre
Objective: Discuss the model of inter-organizational learning as an approach to quality improvement.
Student Projects
In small groups the students wrote reports about one area of HIS for quality improvement in resource poor settings.
Impact of US Federal Funding on eHealth