Neal Lesh is speaking on this tomorrow (Monday) in the CS department:

It is increasingly possible to apply computer innovation to improve aspects of health care delivery in low-income countries. The urgency of this effort is underscored by the unprecedented health inequities that exist between today’s poor and wealthy populations. For example, almost 10% of infants die during their first year in poor countries, compared to 0.5% in wealthy countries. In this talk, I [Lesh] will discuss opportunities for computer science in global health, reporting on the last few years I have spent working in Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Africa on a variety of health delivery projects. These include electronic patient record systems for public AIDS treatment programs, PDAs to guide health workers step-by-step through medical treatment algorithms, and simple solutions to improve the management of blood tests and other laboratory data. Additionally, I will try to give some background on global health inequities, as well the ups and downs of being an ex-pat worker in donor-funded non-profit organizations in
low-income countries.

Neal Lesh is Chief Technology Officer at D-Tree International (www.d-tree.org) and Director of Special Projects at Dimagi (www.dimagi.com). He received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 1998. As a Senior Scientist at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL) in Cambridge, MA, he worked in a variety of areas, including planning, intent inference, information visualization, interactive optimization, and human-computer collaboration. In 2004, Neal got a Master of Public Health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Since then, he has been working and living mostly abroad. In Tanzania, he has worked on electronic medical record systems for a large Harvard-supported AIDS treatment program with tens of thousands of patients in care or treatment. He worked with Partners in Health during the early stages of their operations in rural Rwanda, helping to build reporting systems and laboratory systems. In South Africa and Tanzania, he is investigating the use of handhelds to deliver standardized care to improve the treatment of common causes of child mortality and triaging of HIV+ patients. He will soon start work in Bangladesh to deliver essential information over mobile phones.

The talk is Monday, October 1, 2007, 11am Schapiro Center, Davis Auditorium Columbia University. I wonder if that last bit on mobile phones in Bangladesh is related to our project?