 It’s been a busy past few days! Between doing some Christmas shopping, making quite possible the best PowerPoint deck of my life, figuring out my housing situation for when I come back in January, trying to get myself to go to the gym, and spending time in the field last week, I haven’t had time to post!
I’m flying back to the states tomorrow night and once I’m reunited with high speed internet, I'll share some pictures from the field. But for now, a really cool update from another CHAI Uganda team. Last week, our Lab and eHealth teams presented this brand new Viral Load Dashboard to PEPFAR / CDC. What is viral load? According to aids.gov... “...the term “viral load” refers to the amount of HIV in a sample of your blood. When your viral load is high, you have more HIV in your body, and that means your immune system is not fighting HIV as well. A viral load test is a lab test that measures the number of HIV virus particles in a milliliter of your blood. These particles are called "copies." A viral load test helps provide information on your health status and how well antiretroviral therapy (ART – treatment with HIV medicines) is controlling the virus. ART involves taking a combination of HIV medicines (called an HIV regimen) every day. ART can’t cure HIV, but it can help you live a longer, healthier life and reduce your risk of HIV transmission. The goal of ART is to move your viral load down, ideally to undetectable levels. In general, your viral load will be declared "undetectable" if it is under 40 to 75 copies in a sample of your blood. The exact number depends on the lab that analyzes your test. Having an “undetectable” viral load doesn’t mean that the virus is completely gone from your body, just that it is below what a lab test can find. You still have HIV and need to stay on ART to remain healthy.” This dashboard is big step towards increasing data transparency and access. While I think the hope is that districts will start using this to monitor their own performance more carefully, I’m not sure that there are incentives for them to do so yet. I’d be interested to understand if facilities are held accountable for performance or adherence to national policies and processes. For now, donors, IPs (implementing partners), and CPHL will be some of the main users as they measure progress against key indicators. Potential use cases of the dashboard:
Collecting, reporting, and understanding healthcare data seems to be a challenge for healthcare providers and systems of all sizes. This data can be really powerful for stakeholders to identify underserved populations, quality of care issues, opportunities for time / cost savings, and more. From a few of my experiences working with health systems in the United States, there was an issue of analysis paralysis – there was so much data that was being collected (albeit not always done correctly or consistently), that the teams in charge of going through the data weren’t sure what would be helpful to know more about. Some of that may have been because the analytics teams didn’t have an understanding of what would allow for actionable change and two-way communication about challenges, potential hypotheses about opportunity areas, etc. wasn’t occurring. Presenting and analyzing data in a clear (and agreed upon) manner can be really powerful and I’m excited about what impact this, and other dashboards that teams here at CHAI Uganda are working on, will have. If anyone wants to leverage the front-end code, you can check out the team’s GitHub page here. Maybe I should learn to code…especially if I’m not confident that Tableau will be around forever… Comments are closed.
|
AuthorI'm eager to learn about the world around me and find that travel (and food) is one of my favorite ways in which to do so. 
Archives
May 2016
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed