Rural Public Healthcare and CRM

Our presenters to the Designing Rural Computing Applications course this Tuesday were four UC Berkeley students: Brian DeRenzi, Roxanne Miller, Alison Bloch, and Charlene Chen.

Brian discussed automating routine tasks for community health workers. Brian worked with Neal Lesh in Africa. An interesting observation that Brian raised in his presentation was how a community health worker used the program that Brian and Neal were representing to manipulate community members to abide by the health workers’ public health guidelines. For example, she would say something similar to “they will leave with the cell phones if you don’t start washing your hands more often.”

The second presentation, by Charlene Chen, was on Charlene’s experience designing a customer relationship manager tool for an urban client in Ghana. Charlene used SugarCRM because it is a free, open source database tool. Salesforce.com is another database tool that provides 10 free licenses to nonprofits (you can petition for more free licenses through an application process). One disadvantage to Sugar compared to Salesforce.com is the level of support they provide (I believe there is none for Sugar). Charlene provided a terrific outline of her management of this project. This is particularly useful to me, as I have been working with a local nonprofit myself around the design of a CRM tool. I’m sure this will come in handy many more times in the future.

The final presentation was on Bodas for Life, a project of the UC Berkeley Blum Center. Roxanne Miller and Alison Bloch discussed this project. Bodas is an interesting case in that the group began with an initial idea which evolved into a different conclusion by the end of their field work. UC Berkeley and the Uganda Ministry of Health began the program with the plan to improve access to routine and emergency health care services in rural Uganda through the availability of safer and cheaper boda rides (bodas are motorcycle taxis). The group saw the bodas as passive participants in the program – simply ensuring that the rides were affordable and safe was thought to be enough. However, the program resulted in boda drivers becoming accountable to patients – they began showing preference to patient delivery, even being provided with emergency training. Bodas have become a reliable form of ambulatory care, when they have traditionally been viewed as a cause of many traffic injuries. The Bodas for Life program demonstrated the value of flexibility and empowerment, and is expanding successfully. Their expansion still relies on donor support. If you are interested in contributing to this program, or to find more information on Bodas for Life, visit UC Berkeley’s Blum Center.