Imagine this — you’ve decided to take a trip to Nepal to trek in some of the country’s most remote areas. When you arrive at the small village where you’ll be staying before you start your hike, your breath is immediately taken away by the beauty of the Himalayan peaks surrounding you (and by the fact that you’re 12,000 feet above sea level).
It has taken you a day to travel from the capital city of Kathmandu to get to the village which has a few dozen homes and a small store. After only a short while being there, you meet two women talking outside the small store, one of whom is holding her newborn son and looks concerned. You notice the other scanning through a worn-out medical textbook that appears extremely outdated. The woman reading through the textbook begins talking to you and explains that she is in her first year of residency and is responsible for providing medical treatment to this village and two others nearby. With limited internet, she relies exclusively on the textbook she’s holding, combined with what she learned during medical school to provide care. She is eager to help this woman’s newborn son but is uncertain of his diagnosis.
Now picture yourself in this same village, but this time, the doctor you meet is using an app on her smartphone to search the boy’s symptoms and read through current, evidence-based information in an extensive database to come up with a diagnosis and provide treatment. She can do this all without being connected to the internet.
If you were the boy’s mom, which scenario would you prefer?
Although these specific scenarios are fabricated, they are not far-fetched. In the world’s most under-resourced, remote, disaster-stricken communities, doctors often only have outdated textbooks to use as reference, but that’s beginning to change.
KCE’s mission is to save children’s lives in under-resourced health systems by empowering physicians with state-of-the-art medical software. They envision a world where all physicians caring for children have immediate access to current medical information.
KCE’s mission is to save children’s lives in under-resourced health systems by empowering physicians with state-of-the-art medical software. They envision a world where all physicians caring for children have immediate access to current medical information.
KidsCareEverywhere (KCE) is a public charity based in Berkeley, California. Its mission is to save children’s lives in under-resourced health systems by empowering physicians with state-of-the-art medical software. KCE envisions a world where all physicians caring for children have immediate access to current medical information. Since KCE’s first training site was established in Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2006, KCE has trained more than 10,000 health care workers in 23 countries, on three continents — Africa, Asia, and South America. To achieve this mission, KCE uses DynaMed®, a powerful clinical decision support software from EBSCO Information Services, to help physicians and other health care providers. DynaMed provides fast, evidence-based information to clinicians at the point of care and partners with health system personnel around the world to provide DynaMed licenses and software training to medical personnel in resource-limited countries.
KCE Executive Director Ronald Dieckmann, MD, MPH, started the organization after spending time traveling in different areas of the world and witnessing impoverished children who needed better health care, and seeing how desperately his medical colleagues in low-income communities wanted current medical information. Despite not having contemporary medical references or textbooks, almost all physicians at these sites had cell phones. To bridge the gap in access to current medical knowledge, KCE began supporting doctors, nurses, and other medical providers in resource-poor communities with medical software and training.
KCE has five active core sites: Nepal, Peru, India, Vietnam, and Ghana. In the past, KCE spent most of its resources conducting in-person trainings and visiting hospitals, medical schools, and clinics in low-income communities. However, the last in-person training took place in Ghana during early March of 2020 right as the pandemic was unfolding. Since then, like many organizations during the pandemic, KCE reshaped its operations — shifting from an in-person training model, to entirely virtual. KCE is focusing its efforts and resources on strengthening engagement and increasing software usage at these core sites. To learn more about how KCE is adapting to meet the needs of health providers in low-income countries, check out our next blog post that features a virtual training success story from Nepal.
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