In Uganda, nearly a half million people from surrounding war-torn countries have sought safety in refugee settlements. The U.S. organization, Medical Teams International, operates health clinics in Uganda to help the refugees and locals with their medical needs. But the slow, paper-based system impacts the time it takes to treat patients as well as identify outbreaks of diseases like malaria. Also, it can take up to a month to manually collect and send data from health clinics in Uganda to the United Nations.
Two years ago, Medical Teams decided to find a solution to this problem. They partnered with skilled volunteers, people with specific expertise who are willing to share what they know, to build a technology solution to automate the process and help transform the way refugees in Uganda receive health care. In this episode, we spoke with two of the volunteers chosen for the project, Heidi Brown and Jason Dempsey, who both work in Cambia's IT department.
