Hi Change Group, I hope you're having a nice summer. Kyle Foreman is a student here at IHME who is working in Sri Lanka for the summer, and he has a nice ICT4D-style problem that you might have good ideas about. He wrote a blog post the spells it all out here: http://healthyalgorithms.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/guest-post-from-the-field/
The one paragraph summary: keeping track of something as simple as the number of people who die each year is very difficult here. Patient records are kept at each hospital, then they are tabulated and sent to a regional office, then tabulated at a district office, ad nauseam, until they finally reach the national level. It takes literally years (they just finished the 2006 returns), is full of errors (because they do it all by hand), and is very incomplete (because every step along the way there's further tabulation which strips away valuable data). They thus have difficulty identifying problems (especially outbreaks), targeting resources, and assessing the outcomes of their efforts. --Abie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://changemm.cs.washington.edu/mailman/private/change/attachments/20100728/7a064ef7/attachment.htm>
