Information technology could be a catalyst for improving global health, said Patricia Abbott, associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health and co-director of the PAHO/WHO Collaborating Center for Nursing Knowledge, Information Management and Sharing.
But she warned her audience Tuesday at HIMSS11 that the promise of IT might fail if “it’s thought of in purely western terms.”
Abbott urged attendees to think of IT through the lens of poverty reduction, human rights and local and cultural context.
She highlighted the impact of the global economic crisis on global health.
- 925 million are undernourished around the world. That’s one-seventh of the world’s population – “a truly alarming number,” Abbott said.
- 1,000 women die each day in pregnancy or childbirth.
- Tuberculosis, while slowing declining, is still a major problem in Africa and Southeast Asia.
She tempered her list of discouraging statistics with some words of hope.
“Many people are going to see the glass as half empty, but I don’t,” she said. “I don’t mean to discourage people by brining up all these realities.”
Information technology can be of help, she said, with many of the challenges around the world, such as:
- Unreliable reporting of statistics;
- One-way information flow;
- Solutions that are often not scalable, with spreadsheets and home-grown databases; and
- Paper record-keeping that is a nightmare at best.
Abbott offered examples of several projects around the world that are simple, yet making a big difference.
One of them, Random Hacks of Kindness, brings together software engineers and disaster risk management experts to identify global challenges – including health emergencies – and develop software to respond to them.
She also pointed to the mHealth Initiative, which “is growing by leaps and bounds.”
