DGHI News: DGHI Holds Inaugural Meeting of Board of Advisors

Duke, DGHI Host WISER Teachers from Kenya

Six Kenyan teachers are participating in a professional training program this week as part of a three-week visit to Duke that will help them become better teachers and supporters of young girls in the remote village of Muhuru Bay.

DGHI faculty will lead a special series of lectures for the Kenyan teachers on maternal and child health, orphan care and malaria.
WISER teachers
The group included five teachers and school's principal who are teaching the first class of students this year at the all-girls boarding school and research center in Muhuru Bay, a project of the Women's Institute for Secondary Education and Research (WISER) and co-founded by DGHI member Sherryl Broverman and Duke alumnus Andy Cunningham. The seven-acre campus and research center opened in January, complete with six classrooms, an internet café, a science lab, dormitories, and a clean source of drinking water.

During their visit to Duke, the teachers are participating in professional development courses on inspiring leadership among youth, use of technology in the classroom, and how to become better health advocates at school and in their community.

"Duke has been sending students to Muhuru Bay for the past six years to learn about their culture and health, social, and community development challenges, so it is nice to have these Kenyan teachers have the opportunity to visit Duke and benefit from our resources directly," said Broverman. "This training program at Duke will help them be better teachers and advocates for girls in low-resource environments like Muhuru Bay."

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Tomorrow, the WISER group will host a panel discussion entitled "Education, Women's Empowerment and Global Health in Muhuru Bay, Kenya." The event is free and open to the public. Kenyan food will be served.

Engineering World Health Provides Relief In Haiti

A team of three engineers and technicians from Engineering World Health (EWH) traveled to Haiti from in March to assess and repair EWH in Haiti

medical equipment in five hospitals in Port-au-Prince. The team was invited by AmeriCares to participate in the earthquake relief effort, and they performed a critical evaluation of the state of medical equipment and advised on next steps to improve the technological capacity of the over-burdened hospitals in Haiti.

During the trip, the EWH team was able to perform quick repairs on 25 pieces of medical equipment, including anesthesia machines, suction machines, and ESU generators. They worked with the technicians to provide some training in equipment repair and maintenance. In the photo, EWH-Duke volunteer Lora Perry works with Haitian technician Beauvil Yvener to repair a microscope. Please check out the fundraising auction for this project to the right.

Read more about this project.

Inaugural Duke Center for Health Informatics Conference Addresses "Meaningful Use"

Duke Fuqua School of Business hosted the inaugural Duke Center for Health Informatics (D-CHI) Conference last month, which included 150 participants from almost 70 organizations and focused on the concept of "meaningful use," a new federal requirement for electronic health information systems.

The conference focused on four of the five aspects of meaningful use: quality and safety, care coordination, population and public health, and patient-centered care. Panels discussed opportunities to transform care in each of these domains utilizing new technology. They also outlined challenges in developing and implementing standards for each area that will foster rather than retard the development of the technology as investment continues to flow into this field as a result of the Federal incentive payments.

The conference was sponsored by D-CHI, a joint venture of Fuqua's Health Sector Management Program, the Duke Schools of Medicine and Nursing, and the Duke Health System. D-CHI aims to implement three key strategies to achieve its mission of enhancing the meaningful use of informatics and technology to improve healthcare: (1) focusing on outcomes, (2) integrating research into healthcare systems, and (3) involving Duke's medical, nursing, business, and other schools in development of interdisciplinary educational curricula, such as its unique Masters of Management in Clinical Informatics (MMCi) degree program, the first clinical informatics program at any business school in the U.S.