Planning Ahead

We have been busy the last couple of weeks trying to envision and dream of a future AMPATH. What would it look like in five years. The big reason for this is to help articulate a vision of how AMPATH will Provide Access To Healthcare (PATH). Right now the HIV care at AMPATH covers a wide geographic area of Western Kenya and while we have been moving into areas of primary health care and chronic disease management we are not doing this quite at the same level.  In the coming few years, all this will change in a big way, we want to expand all areas of care (including public health and social services offerings) to all sites that we have presence, right now it is 67 different locations, but that number will change I am sure.

On the IT side, it is one of those moments where we can truly re-define what we do and how it is done. We have been building up the team over the last year and have started implementing a re-organization plan.  The pace of our re-org has been a bit slow, but we recognize that the scope of change is quite large and it will simply take time to do it right.*

* Managing a number of large projects also makes it tough to do any major reorganization. Just not enough hours in the day for everything.

Looking forward, I feel that we have general agreement in the IT group that in five years (well less than five years), we want to see our medical record system be fully available in all areas and that we push out the data collection to the point of care and into the hands of our care providers (medical, social services and public health providers).  We really want to have a paperless and efficient operation where ever possible.*

* Honestly, we want paperless everywhere in five years.

To do all of this will require that completely upgrade all of our operations and our team must really step up our game. We must become a top flight IT organization and we must constantly deliver.  We need to improve just about everything we do. It will test us all and I think the team will rise to the occasion.

It is pretty exciting overall to picture what our piece of the world can be and know that we will get the actual funding we need to start down the path. It is critical that we are flexible in everything that we do, who knows how technology will change in five years.* We cannot be so rigid that we lock ourselves into a plan that will no longer be feasible come 2014.

* Think about the IT world five years ago. In December of 2006, the iPhone, Android and the Kindle didn't exist and tablet computing was a modified laptop running Windows XP.  I was using (and enjoying) my Treo 700.  Really, Palm was still a company back then. 

Things won't officially start until October of 2012, we have time to organize and plan things. It means we also have time to get some aspects of the future started in the next few months.  I'm looking forward this.