Health eVillages launches new mHealth effort in Haiti

Health eVillages, the global mHealth program launched roughly two years ago by Physicians Interactive's Donato Tramuto and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, has launched another program to deliver much-needed healthcare services to Haiti.

The Marlborough, Mass.-based program this week unveiled the Health eVillages College Outreach (HERO) program, which will place nursing educators from Weston, Mass.-based Regis College in the impoverished Caribbean nation and arm them with mHealth tools to help train clinicians there.

The program will begin by sponsoring two coordinators, one from Regis College and one from Haiti, in a health center run jointly by the Haitian Ministry of Health and Partners in Health in Hinche, a city in central Haiti. Partners in Health has been helping to deliver healthcare in Haiti for 25 years.

"Physicians Interactive could not be more pleased to be an active partner with Regis College and Partners In Health in the HERO program," said Tramuto, who is CEO and vice chairman of Physicians Interactive, in a March 7 press release. "Having partners on the ground in Haiti who have the experience, the relationships and the trust of their communities is a blessing for Health eVillages. We are not only excited to sponsor the introduction of nurse educators in Hinche, but we look forward to providing those caregivers with unmatched medical information and tools that will empower them to improve the quality of patient care."

"Regis College is proud to continue its work in improving patient outcomes in Haiti through our partnership with Physicians Interactive and Health eVillages," added Regis College President Antoinette Hays, PhD, RN, in the release. "With its limited resources, Haiti has long struggled with providing healthcare to residents in some of the most underserved regions of the country. The HERO program, along with Health eVillages, will help the Hinche health center provide quality care not just at the clinic level, but also in the surrounding rural areas whose residents may not be able to travel to Hinche."

Health eVillages, through Physicians Interactive, will provide mHealth training at Regis College this March for the coordinators, and support the program in Haiti with clinical decision support, healthcare reference resources and mHealth devices like the iPad and iPod Touch, which are updated with French-language apps to help improve accessibility in the predominantly French-speaking nation.

This isn't the first time Health eVillages has been active in Haiti. The organization, which provides devices such as smartphones, iPads and iPod touches along with specialized medical reference content and clinical decision support tools, initially launched in 2011 to support efforts in Haiti following a devastating earthquake. Since then the program has branched out to Kenya, Uganda, China and other remote locations in underserved parts of the world. The program has also established partnerships with other global foundations, including Doctors Without Borders, Partners in Health and the Clinton Foundation.

Health eVillages will next expand its outreach to Central and South America in a partnership with Project Hope, which conducts humanitarian assistance programs in more than 35 countries.

Tramuto last week was named one of the winners of Healthcare IT News' H.I.T. Men & Women Awards at the 2013 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition. In an interview prior to HIMSS13, he noted that Health eVillages' global non-profit efforts and Physicians Interactive's work in the United States have helped to train hundreds of thousands of nurses, doctors and other caregivers in the use of mobile devices to improve healthcare delivery.

Physicians Interactive, which focuses on providing mobile decision support and other resources for providers in the United States, currently has a network of more than 2 million healthcare users, including more than 900,000 physicians, nurses and allied health professionals. The year the company is launching OMNI, a new iPad medical app that enables providers to access clinical decision support, and PI's Toolkit, a platform designed to help life sciences companies interact with physicians through their electronic health records.

Tramuto is especially proud of Health eVillages' work to bring healthcare to underserved parts of the world, saying healthcare providers there are in dire need of education and tools and eager to learn.

"Just because they're poor doesn't mean they're stupid," he pointed out.

"Innovation is not our problem – integration is our problem," he added. "We have all the tools we need at our disposal. We just have to find a way to get them into the hands of the right people, then teach them how to use them."

Eric Wicklund

Editor of mHIMSS.org

Follow Eric on Twitter @eriwick