195 Banbury Road
A4165, Oxford, Oxford OX2 7AR
UK
The role of eHealth in chronic disease management in low and middle income countries
and the importance of scalable, modular, open systems
Dr Hamish Fraser
Monday, February 9th, 2015
The Mawby Room, Kellogg College
5PM – 6PM
** Drinks Served from 4.30pm**
Abstract
The burden of chronic diseases is rapidly increasing worldwide. It has been estimated by the World Health Organization that, in 2001, chronic diseases contributed approximately 60% of the 56.5 million total reported deaths in the world and approximately 46% of the global burden of disease. Moreover, the proportion of the burden of non-communicable diseases is expected to increase up to 57% by 2020. Approximately 50% of the total chronic disease deaths are attributable to cardiovascular diseases, with obesity and diabetes occurring earlier in life. Improving quality of care for chronic diseases requires an effective longitudinal medical record that can be used to track patient statuses and generate Focusing on the empowering application of electronic medical records and other eHealth/mHealth systems to manage healthcare, Dr Fraser will discuss the potential strategies for managing chronic diseases in the LMICs. He will draw examples for over 10 years experience leading the development of open source web-based medical record systems including OpenMRS, along with data analysis tools, and pharmacy systems to support the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV in Peru, Haiti, Rwanda, Malawi and the Philippines.
Biography
Dr Hamish Fraser is a physician who recently returned to the UK as Associate Professor in eHealth at the University of Leeds. Prior to this he was an Assistant Professor in the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston. For 12 years he was the Director of Informatics and Telemedicine at Partners In Health (PIH), a non-profit global health care organization founded in 1987 by Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, and Jim Yong Kim. Dr Fraser’s work has led to the migration of medical informatics tools and expertise from high income countries to some of the poorest and most challenging environments in the world. Along with colleagues from the Regenstrief Institute at the University of Indiana and the South African Medical Research Council, Dr. Fraser is a co-founder OpenMRS, an international collaboration to develop a flexible, open source electronic medical record system platform for use in low and middle income countries (LMICs). OpenMRS is now used to support patient treatment in more than 50 LMICs. Dr Fraser has recently been co-leading a project to develop a custom version of OpenMRS adapted for use by staff in protective equipment in the Kerry Town Sierra Leone Ebola Treatment Center. He has a strong interest in the evaluation of medical information systems in LMICs and has carried out studies in Peru, Haiti, and Rwanda. He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and Section Editor for the Journal BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making.