Digital Doctor
The mission of “Digital Doctor” is to improve health outcomes for HIV+ orphans and vulnerable children and their families.
Our primary goals are:
- Improve health outcomes for children and families enrolled in POL’s pediatric HIV care program
- Strengthen communities.
There are two elements of this program:
1. Connecting doctors and nurses around the world to the health care team in Zambia. Once everyone is connected, the global team can tackle difficult cases in real time.
2. Maintain an electronic health record (EHR) for all children. This will improve health outcomes for children and families enrolled and for the larger community. The EHR system will track the health (medical history, past and current infections, trajectory of the underlying HIV infection, etc.) of each child in our pediatric HIV care program.
We are confident this program will have significant impact on our ability to monitor, diagnose, and treat infections. In addition, we can detect community-wide infections to rapidly administer prophylactic response at the community level.
Once the data for all children (about 1100 over the last 10 years) is loaded onto the EHR software, it would be possible to make preditions regarding infections and provide anticipatory care. In addition, physicians from around the world can be reached swiftly to tackle difficult cases.
Digital Doctor promises to improve the health of children, and increase school attendance with a relatively small budget.
This project promises to improve health outcomes and increase school attendance. We expect that this project will have a large and sustained impact on the community in a relatively short time period of time.
