SynthesisSummary of Weeks Discussion on Building eHealth Capacity

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Synthesis/Summary of Weeks Discussion on
Building eHealth Capacity

• Bill Hersh
• (with copy and paste from others)

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Given

• eHealth is essential for global health in the
  21st century
• Technology must be appropriate and contextual,
  which is not synonymous with old
• Information is care

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New (key) principles

• Informatics is essential to health and economic
  development
• Need technology, human, and leadership capacity
• To develop capacity, need informatics leadership
  and training and development of regional centers
  of excellence
• Must make case to policy and political leaders
  and get buy-in of health care professionals
• Need not only training, but training the trainer
• Need forum for expertise to assemble political,
  business, health care, and technology leaders
• Must adhere to standards, best practices, and
  avoidance of siloed systems

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Other emerging ideas

• Informatics is a means to an end, not an end in
  itself. Capacity building should be needs driven.
  A menu of common needs can be built up to assist
  countries in their eHealth capacity building
  strategies.
• There are different levels/types of informatics
  training required for different roles/positions.
  A list of Informatics Profiles should be built up
  with their corresponding competencies, training
  needs and resources available for the training.
• A National eHealth Assessment Methodology should
  be developed to allow a country to work through
  their needs profiles to come up with a viable
  National eHealth Roadmap. Eventually this
  methodology could be embodied in a tool, e.g., a
  National eHealth Wizard (NEW).
• Leadership and advocacy are vital, and exposure
  to informatics concepts is key to building the
  necessary support amongst policy makers,
  "influentials" and change agents.
• Regional Informatics Centres of Excellence could
  provide sustained informatics activities to
  continue to drive eHealth developments.

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Commissioned papers

• Educating the Health Informatics Workforce in the
  Global South by Judy Ozbolt, PhD, RN
• Determining Health Informatics Workforce Needs in
  Developing Economies by William Hersh et al.
• Developing Partnerships by William Tierney et al.

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Educating the Health Informatics Workforce

• Environmental scan already models of success
• RAFT project in French-speaking African countries
• 10x10 translation in Latin America
• We must learn from and build on known successes

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Determining Health Informatics Workforce Needs

• Training is one of the bottlenecks for clinical
  systems implementation
• Some topics mentioned were competencies required
  by the workforce, number of trained people needed
  (which is related to the degree of development of
  information systems
• IMIA Working group on Education (WG1)
  recommendations, issued in year 2000, are being
  updated this year

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Developing Partnerships

• Information is care
• Implementing eHealth ? making (often radical)
  changes in systems of health care
• Partners ? enlightened self-interest
• Eyes on the prize ? long-term partnerships
• Build local capacity ? avoid dependence
• Publicize and build on successful programs,
  methods, approaches, etc.
• Collaborate among countries, partnerships
• Be satisfied with small successes

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Case studies

• Heard from diverse locations
• South Africa
• Turkey
• Peru
• Vietnam
• Brazil

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Lessons from case studies

• Need national policy and leadership
• Must have adequate infrastructure and awareness
  of eHealth
• South can become innovation leader due to lack
  of legacy systems and ability to leapfrog

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2020

• An educational program (meta-curriculum)
• Scalable, adaptable/agile (to local conditions),
  affordable
• A set of educational resources
• Portal to resources
• A repository of resources
• A framework to develop local educational material
  (Wiki like approach)
• Tool for the creation/adaptation/delivery of
  curricula
• A network /consortium
• Academic sites
• National/regional informatics associations (AMIA
  / IMIA, etc.)
• Private/public organizations
• A permanent set of discussed cases
• Including successes and failures (how the
  amino-acid have been combined) to create useful
  educational material

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Financial technical support
2020 Consortium (AMIA, IMIA, universities,
others)
Local Experts
Support for local experts could include support
for communities of practice (national and
regional organizations), faculty (e.g salary
support, professional development, fellowships,
grants), support for institutions (libraries,
infrastructure, etc)
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Support for courses could include resources,
curriculae, technical consultation, case studies
and others
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• Topic-specific short courses modules (Amino
  acids, Bits and bytes)
• Introductory informatics courses for clinicians
  (similar to 10x10)
• Higher-level informatics courses (Masters, PhD,
  etc)

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Financing proper business model is essential

• Financing at a consortium level on a recurrent
  basis
• Look also to Education, SciTech, Finance
  ministries
• To sponsor scholarships/fellowship (at an
  individual or group level)
• For Faculty time/course material production and
  updating to
• develop materials or curricula
• run courses
• To translate/localize the educational materials

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Hierarchy of needs
Policy
Human Capital
Technology
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Moving forward

• From silos to systems
• Human as well as technology capacity
• Learning from past experience and mistakes
• Being evidence-driven
• Building research into operations to improve
  above
• Prioritizing local ownership and leadership,
  empowered by expertise from international leaders
  and organizations