Community Health Toolkit

Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Community
#86

Hi all,
I’ve been lurking here on the forum for a while and thought I’d introduce myself :slight_smile: I’m Sudip Pokhrel, Government Partnerships Manager at Medic Mobile. The city of Kathmandu is my home base, and I’ve been with Medic for more than three years. Its been a great journey so far, nurturing partnerships with governments, seeing them adopt and use our tools, and supporting community health workers on their noble mission. I’m super excited about the CHT, and its value proposition as an open-source, public good for strengthening community health worldwide!

Off work, I’m often spotted in wild, secluded places watching birds and taking pictures.

6 Likes
#87

Hi everyone,
I just recently got to know Medic Mobile through Mark Herringer (healthsites.io), who invited me to join the discussion around the COVID 19 response.
I am a research associate at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (heigit.org). The HeiGIT improves knowledge and technology transfer from fundamental research in geoinformatics to practical applications, with a specific focus on OpenStreetMap (OSM) and other geodata and humanitarian and public health contexts. We work in close collaboration with the fellow members of the Missing Maps initiative (missingmaps.org), including Red Cross, MSF, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, healthsites.io and other humanitarian organizations. Our main services include the OpenStreetMap based openrouteservice (openrouteservice.org), the ohsome OSM History framework (ohsome.org) and MapSwipe Analytics (https://heigit.org/mapswipe-analytics/).
Related to the global COVID 19 response, we recently published a research map around COVID 19, providing an overview of all clinical trials and research, https://covid-19.heigit.org/index.html. We furthermore support Mark Herringer and the healthsites.io team in COVID-19 logical framework & geospatial data.
I am very looking forward to learning more about the work of this community and how we can work together! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you are interested in learning more about our work.

7 Likes
#88

Welcome @MelanieE! It’s great to have you here. I know a couple of our Research & Learning team members would be interested to learn more about your use of geoinformation. Tagging in @lucas and @maria to take it away!

1 Like
#89

Hi all! I’m Jessie Duan, most recently a Software Engineering Manager at Quora. I’ll be volunteering with Medic Mobile over the next couple of weeks, helping on technical projects.

I’m based in the US on the East Coast, and I’m excited to be here and contribute!

5 Likes
#90

Hi All! I’m Julius, a Software Engineer at Andela currently working with Better Place Forests remotely. When I am not building for mobile or web, I play chess with friends, take one day hikes or probably enjoy a good book.
I’m excited about the Community Health Toolkit and I can’t wait to contribute!

5 Likes
#91

Hello everyone,
I am Mita, software engineer by training, have been leading engineering organizations at Apple, Intuit and other companies. I am currently based in the bay are and happy to help with this effort in any way possible.

5 Likes
#92

Hi everyone, my name is Riya and I just moved back to the Bay Area after working in India as a social impact consultant for a few years. I have experience at the intersection of product management, primary health care and data systems. I’m eager and excited to support this work as a Medic Mobile volunteer!

5 Likes
#93

Hi,

I’m Gaurav, an Engineering Manager at Airbnb, based out of San Francisco. I’m here to help out however I can - be it product management, engineering management, or software engineering work. I can also leverage my network to get us additional software support if needed.

5 Likes
#94

Hi everyone! I’m Paul Vial, a data scientist with a background in health informatics. I used to work on medical imaging products at Change Healthcare, and I am now working on a machine learning product for transit systems at Hyperlight Systems. I’ve done some volunteer work for Partners in Health and the International Organization for Migration in the past. I live in Vancouver BC, where I love to spend time outdoors running, backcountry snowboarding, etc., although I’m spending a lot more time indoors these days as I sure all of you are! Relevant Skills: data analytics and visualization, machine learning, statistical modelling. Nice to meet you all!

5 Likes
#95

Hi Everyone,

I’m thrilled to be part of this community. I am three weeks into a new role as Deputy Director at the Community Health Impact Coalition, working closely with @mballard and many other members of this group.

I fortuitously “stumbled” into global public health in 2011 while working for Deloitte Consulting on a health systems strengthening project in Mozambique. I was seconded to the Central Medical Stores and quickly developed an interest in access to medicines which led me to Living Goods. In 2014, I moved to Uganda sight unseen to join LG’s Partnership Team, where I helped launch the first digital tools with CHWs in Uganda (and later watched the brilliant evolution in partnership with Medic Mobile!) and helped LG seed partnerships in Kenya, Zambia, and Myanmar. Along the way, I met so many brilliant practitioners, policymakers, and thinkers - and have been inspired by so many incredible community health workers on the frontlines of the primary healthcare system.

My nights and weekends generally involve MPH schoolwork. I’m nearly at the finish line of my MPH through the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I live in Charlotte, NC where I love to spend time exercising, working jigsaw puzzles, entertaining my springer spaniel, and cooking. I am an aspiring baker and gardener. And, like many in this group, I love to travel.

I look forward to working with all of you!

6 Likes
#96

Great to have you here @Carey_Westgate! And thank you for posting the CHIC research round up, I think it’s great for the community on this forum to stay up to date with that literature.

1 Like
#97

Hi everyone, I’m Ashley, a Canadian software developer with a background in biology and previous clinical and digital health experience. As a new grad, there’s so much about health, technology, and health technology that I want to learn. I’ve been really interested in contributing, to the point that I started working on an issue already (cht-core #6313). Is this the right place to ask to be added to the github contributor list?

3 Likes
#98

Welcome to the CHT forum @AshleyWWW! This is totally the right place to introduce yourself and get started, and the next step is on Github. I see that #6313 has a Help wanted tag so it’s probably a good fit for your first issue. I’d encourage you to leave a comment on the issue in Github saying that you’d like to work on that issue, so that the core developers at Medic Mobile know that work is underway. You may’ve already seen the Contributing doc, there’s more info in there about submitting your first pull request. For security reasons the policy on the CHT-Core repo is that all pull requests undergo code review by a small number of core developers, and you won’t need to be added to the core contributor list in order to be able to submit a pull request. Let us know if you have any more questions, and thanks in advance for contributing!

By the way, what part of Canada are you from? I live in Seattle but my spouse is from Kelowna, and we have a number of other Canadians in the CHT community :smile: :canada:

1 Like
#99

Hi everyone!

I’m Azra, a PhD student in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech. I joined the forum some time back but started following some of the conversations here more actively recently. So wonderful to see such a great community!

As an ethnographer and designer, I am broadly interested in health and data workflows at the frontlines. Over the past 4 years, I have been working with CHWs and mothers in an underserved region of Delhi to inform the design of technology that takes into account their everyday contexts. I am also very interested in the human-centered design of emerging AI/ML interventions for healthcare provision in the Global South.

I’m always up to chat about human-centered design! In a past life, I was trained as a computer engineer, before I found my passion for community health and design! :smiley:

3 Likes
#100

I just left a comment on the ticket. Thanks for the explanation about the repo guidelines.

I’m from Toronto! Hello to all the other Canadians in the CHT community!

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#101

Hi Azra, we’re so glad to have you with us! I’m especially excited about your love of human-centered design — do you have any favorite resources or websites you can share?

1 Like
#102

Glad to have you here @azra! We talked about scheduling a call a few months ago and I’m sorry I never followed up. Feel free to DM me if you’d like to schedule a time in the afternoon PST next week, I’d be interested to hear how your research is going. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
#103

Hi Francesca,
Sure, there are so many great resources! @isaacholeman 's and @dianna 's paper on Human-centered design for global health equity in ITID is a great place to start and offers an overview of the field.

More references:

  1. On participatory design: Simonsen, J., & Robertson, T. (Eds.). (2012). Routledge international handbook of participatory design.
  2. For a feminist and social justice perspective to design: Bardzell, S. (2010, April). Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1301-1310).
  3. For design in the global south: http://designbeku.in/ethical-research-for-the-next-billion-users/
  4. On cultural probes as a method:
    Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: cultural probes. interactions, 6(1), 21-29.
    Wardle, C. J., Green, M., Mburu, C. W., & Densmore, M. (2018, April). Exploring co-design with breastfeeding mothers. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).
  5. On value-sensitive design: Sengers, P., Boehner, K., David, S., & Kaye, J. J. (2005, August). Reflective design. In Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility (pp. 49-58).

Just to add: I think human-centered design is as much a set of philosophies as methods. The above are some of the ones that I was introduced to early on!

2 Likes
#104

Not at all, would still love to chat :smiley:
Sending you a DM!

#105

Hi all!

My name is Liz McNeil, I’m the new communications and external relations manager at Jacaranda Health, based in Nairobi. There seem to be quite a few Canadians coming onto this forum lately - I am a fellow Canadian! I’ve been living in East Africa for the past 5-6ish years, with the last two in Nairobi. I am a new-comer to the tech space, and have been working in health-related social enterprises on business development and partnerships before joining the Jacaranda Health team. I’m really passionate about empowering users and

A bit about us: We’re a non-profit, tech-enabled organization that creates solutions for government hospitals and healthcare systems to improve maternal health outcomes. We currently partner with 5 counties (Bungoma, Kiambu, Nairobi, Makueni, Muranga) and are expanding rapidly to reach more counties in the near future. One of our core solutions is PROMPTS: a free 2-way SMS platform for new and expectant moms. Mothers enroll using a shortcode to receive information about pregnancy and newborn health, potential danger signs, and nudge appointment reminders. Since it’s two-way, they can also text in questions to clinical experts at our helpdesk. The purpose of this platform is to empower mothers with the information that they need to seek care when they need it, especially at critical times. To date, we have enrolled 150,000 mothers on the platform from 250 clinics and hospitals, and have 72,000 monthly active users, and an active help desk as well, answering 550 questions per day.

Really excited to be on this forum and learn about the other cool stuff that is going on in the space! Please reach out to chat or if you’re interested in learning more about what we do :slight_smile: