For many years, doctors and medical volunteers have spent countless hours in Haiti providing health care to those in need. Yet, even with the decades of effort by such committed people, this work has not moved the needle for health care enough.
Haiti is one of the world’s most extreme medical environments. The statistics are staggering: the maternal mortality rate is 1 in 16, and the mortality rates for hypertension and stroke are the highest in North America. Throughout the past decade, as the nation has faced natural and political hardship, it has been clear that the familiar health care models of “hit and run relief” and “drive-by medical tours” do not work in Haiti. The presence of an estimated 4,500 non-governmental organizations and 10,000 charities working in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake underscores the fragmentation, redundancy and waste that are inherent to the current disjointed means of support. There is indeed a simpler, more inclusive and effective way to solve systemic, chronic health problems.
We founded Colleagues In Care to help answer this very call to service and change for the destitute poor in Haiti. As Chief Collaboration and Learning Officer for Colleagues In Care, I have witnessed, first hand, the power that comes from creating a single, vital global health network. Through engaging the best medical minds in the world, while focusing on purpose, participation and performance, we are helping transform the working medical blueprint in Haiti – “CollaborHaitian!” We are changing the rules of the game!
Colleagues In Care needed new cloud-based, crowd-sourcing, social and mobile technologies, and enhanced learning tools to truly make a difference. We needed to develop adaptable “best possible practices” for quality protocols of care and for sustained collaboration and learning on a global scale.
In line with the “CollaborHaitian” initiative and using cloud computing technology from IBM, doctors, nurses, medical personnel and other partners – including IBM employees – are connecting with one another. They are sharing best practices, tools and knowledge. And the emerging insights are being used within the community as a whole, and more importantly, by the vast number of volunteers and practitioners on the ground in Haiti.
Using the IBM SmartCloud, Colleagues In Care is creating a grassroots movement to transform the future of health care for the underserved – anywhere in the world. This Haitian model will be easily replicated and tailored to assess and address the medical issues of any area affected by poverty, limitation and extreme need. The cloud computing technology from IBM has given us a means to recruit, introduce and connect the world’s most renowned specialists with local health professionals. Colleagues In Care forges agreements with leading organizations to gain access to U.S. protocols, standard order sets, and clinical pathways, as well as medical educational content.
This collaboration and conversation not only bridges the gap between local and global expertise, but also inspires the co-creation of a “Best Possible Practices Model” (BPPM). With BPPM, we and our panel of volunteer specialists are able to offer specifically designed care that honors local circumstances and unites evidence- and reality-based medicine. The result is pinpoint focus of resources and care on highly critical illnesses, diseases and medical conditions – helping to reverse the dire health and health care of the underserved inHaiti.
The “power of community” speaks volumes for our organization. We are bringing a world of medical expertise to Haiti, and through these virtual relationships, we address health care issues with an immediacy that is unprecedented. Our tools enable us to offer on-site practitioners an arsenal of resources and support that has never before been available with such efficacy. Practices may be fine-tuned and implemented in the moment of need while insights and solutions may be presented as training tools for others. This model feeds itself, and growth becomes automatic as knowledge is shared freely and new conversations are sparked.
The common passion for service within the diverse network of people – each offering distinct knowledge, experience, perspective and vision – becomes contagious within the system. Colleagues In Care is helping take medical volunteerism to another level: colleague to colleague. We’re helping to transform good intentions and volunteerism into tangible outcomes. We are co-creating social value!
Marie Kenerson is Chief Collaboration and Learning Officer of Colleagues In Care, a global health network of doctors, nurses, medical personnel and other partners working together to provide quality health care services, telemedicine, knowledge and training to aid the poor and help alleviate suffering. Marie has combined organizational learning principles, dialogue skills and collaboration strategies with new IBM cloud and social network technologies to “crowd-source” a network of top medical professionals and volunteers from around the world in order to co-create and deliver localized best-possible medical practices.
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11:37 AM
Marie, I had the great fortune to see you discuss Colleagues in Care at the IBM Cloud Innovation forum in Chicago last week. Your organization has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to a challenge that is essential to the lives of the people of Haiti. I applaud your organization’s efforts and I am impressed with the collaboration practices you are pioneering leveraging IBM technologies. The concept of “best possible practices” is applicable to many other real world problems and your comments in the IBM Cloud Innovation event last week opened the eyes of all the participants to opportunities to use their business skills for social good. Thank you.
Posted by: Chester Karwatowski
2:18 PM
Thank you for your comments, Chester. I am glad that the flexibility and scalability of the systemic approach to the Best Possible Practices Model came across. Indeed, CIC’s BPP model is not only adaptable to other limited-resource regions struggling with healthcare but it can be applied to any complex social problem. We believe it to be both transformational and sustainable.
Posted by: Marie Kenerson
2:58 AM
There is no doubt that access to the latest information and expertise will contribute to better health outcomes. There are many of “telemedicine” and other innovative examples of creating links between the haves and have nots of the medical world. But that’s a far cry from transforming healthcare for the underserved. The staggering maternal mortality rate in a place like Haiti isn’t a result of lack of expertise (though that is certainly an issue), it’s the lack of access. Pregnant women can’t get to or afford any medical care, let alone the high quality care they need for . Best of luck in continuing to bridge the expertise gap. And bravo for slamming the bankruptcy of current charity aid models in Haiti.
Posted by: humanicontrarian
3:53 PM
Thank you for your comments on the often over-used term “transformation”. I appreciate and agree with your sentiment that it takes a lot more than delivery of medical education and professional development to solve complex social problems like healthcare in low-resource areas. This is why CIC’ unique approach is focused on co-creating Best Possible Practices2 using cloud-based social learning technologies to both facilitate collaboration and equalize access. By co-creating standardized but customized medical protocols, we are marrying evidence-based and reality-based medicine to standardize quality and delivery across Haiti, and then, making these BPP’s accessible anywhere. This is changing both the way medicine is practiced and how many people are trained to care for patients. It is true even in the US, that a large percentage of procedures are deliverable by non-physicians with BPP’s and training in place.
As the Chief Collaboration and Learning Officer using IBM’s SmartCloud Social Business platform to transform healthcare delivery in Haiti -”CollaborHaitian,” it is clear that emerging technologies are changing the way we work and have the potential to drive innovative transformational solutions to complex social issues. However, even though these social business, collaboration technologies are game changers, we know that technology alone will not deliver the promises of breakthrough innovation. It is critical to embed into and surround these technologies with learning organization practices, dialogue, and change processes to optimize the use of technology.
In our experience as a start-up with a new business model, we continue to face the inertia of traditional legacy systems and ways of working. New Cloud Software is great, even intuitive, but without building in the practices for network learning, trust, sharing, dialoguing, capturing accumulated knowledge, coordinating, negotiating, and co-creating, we just have a nice place to meet. Embedding these new ways of working moves us beyond meetings and networking to co-creating, generating and delivering results. Social business is about shifting to the source of work: people, so we can humanize systems, to leverage more expertise, diversity, and collective intelligence. CIC is harnessing a global workforce of compassionate people who want to volunteer but may not want to travel. That has huge potential for transforming how we address complex wicked social problems.
Posted by: Marie Kenerson