Physicians Interactive and Health eVillages Launch HERO Mobile Healthcare Partnership to improve quality of healthcare provided in underserved regions of Haiti.
Physicians Interactive, the leading provider of online and mobile clinical resources and solutions for clinicians, today announced a partnership with Regis College and Partners In Health to improve healthcare in the most underserved regions of Haiti. The program will employ the services of Health eVillages, a program of Physicians Interactiveand the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights which delivers critical healthcare information via mobile technology to clinicians practicing in challenging environments around the world.
The Health eVillages Regis College Outreach (“HERO”) program will sponsor two coordinators, one from Regis College and one from Haiti, providing them with the means and tools needed to help elevate the quality of care in the area around Hinche, a city in central Haiti. The health center in Hinche is run jointly by the Haitian Ministry of Health and Partners In Health, which has been delivering healthcare in Haiti for 25 years. Regis College also sponsors an international nursing faculty initiative to educate nursing faculty in Haiti.
Health eVillages through Physicians Interactive will also provide up-to-date mobile clinical decision support and healthcare reference resources, including mobile device training, in March at Regis College in Weston, MA. Through the HERO program, Health eVillages will not only sponsor the coordinators and nurses treating patients in Haiti, but will also support the health center by sending Regis’ nurse educators, armed with iPod Touches, to teach at Hinche twice a year.
“Regis College is proud to continue its work in improving patient outcomes in Haiti through our partnership with Physicians Interactive and Health eVillages,” said Regis College President Antoinette Hays, Ph.D., R.N. “With its limited resources, Haiti has long struggled with providing healthcare to residents in some of the most underserved regions of the country. The HERO program, along with Health eVillages, will help the Hinche health center provide quality care not just at the clinic level, but also in the surrounding rural areas whose residents may not be able to travel to Hinche.”
Under the program, the Haitian coordinator will receive training at Regis College on the Skyscape mobile app running on Apple iPad and iPod Touch devices. She will then return to Hinche to train her staff on how to use the devices to deliver better patient care at the health center and nearby rural areas. The devices have been updated with several new French-language medical apps to increase accessibility for the Haitian nurses, especially in the surrounding rural areas around Hinche.
“Physicians Interactive could not be more pleased to be an active partner with Regis College and Partners In Health in the HERO program,” said Donato Tramuto, CEO and Vice Chairman of Physicians Interactive and Founder and Chairman of Health eVillages. “Having partners on the ground in Haiti who have the experience, the relationships and the trust of their communities is a blessing for Health eVillages. We are not only excited to sponsor the introduction of nurse educators in Hinche, but we look forward to providing those caregivers with unmatched medical information and tools that will empower them to improve the quality of patient care.”
Health eVillages provides handheld devices, such as smartphones, iPod Touches and iPads, that include specialized medical reference content and clinical decision support tools to clinicians in developing countries. Healthcare professionals using Health eVillages devices saw more than 20,000 patients in 2012. Since the program launched in 2011, Health eVillages has put devices in the hands of more than 100 clinicians worldwide, enabling critical improvements to patient care in Kenya, Uganda, China, Haiti and rural Louisiana.
Physicians Interactive is a leading healthcare provider resource for medical information, medication sampling, patient benefits and mobile decision support via web, mobile and electronic health record channels. PI’s innovative solutions, including their PI Toolkit™ for electronic health records (EHRs), and OMNIO® medical app, help better connect healthcare professionals and life sciences companies in meaningful ways that improve the quality of patient care. To date, PI reaches a network of more than 900,000 physicians, nurses and allied health professionals in the United States, with more than two million downloads of its medical apps worldwide.