Description

Job Title:         Medical Informatics Technical Specialist

Reports to:       HUM Chief Medical Officer

Location:         Mirebalais, Haiti

Type:               Full-time volunteer

Duration:         Six months, with option to extend to one year

Organizational Profile:

Partners In Health (PIH), co-founded by Dr. Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl and headquartered in Boston, MA, is an internationally recognized non-profit organization whose mission is to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care. Through its service delivery, training, advocacy and research, PIH works globally to bring the benefits of modern medical science to those most in need. PIH has sites in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as well as Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Peru, Guatemala, Mexico, Russia, Kazakhstan, Boston, and Navajo Nation, where we work tirelessly to lessen the joint burden of disease and poverty.

Project Profile:

In the town of Mirebalais, located at the intersection of two roads 30 miles north of Port-au-Prince, Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante (PIH/ZL) is in the midst of the biggest reconstruction project launched in Haiti since the January 2010 earthquake: a 312-bed teaching hospital. A national referral and teaching center, l’Hôpital Universitaire de Mirebalais (HUM) was developed and designed in response to a direct request from the Haitian Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP) in accordance with the national plan to decentralize access to care and medical education. When the hospital opens in early 2013 the medical campus, encompassing eleven buildings, will offer a new standard of care and provide high-quality education for the next generation of Haitian medical students, resident physicians, nurses and other clinical staff.

PIH is one of the founders of OpenMRS, an open source, web-based Electronic Medical Record (EMR).  Through a partnership with ThoughtWorks, Inc. PIH has built a version of OpenMRS that it will be deploying at Mirebalais Hospital to support collection of important clinical information in real-time.  PIH has also developed software for the management of supply chain and inventory, OpenBoxes, which it will be piloting at Mirebalais. These two projects put HUM at the forefront of healthcare facilities using electronic health information systems in the developing world.

Job Description Overview:

The Medical Informatics Technical Specialist will lead the implementation of electronic and paper-based information systems to support clinical services, laboratory, pharmacy, radiology and inventory management at HUM.  These functions are essential in order to achieve PIH and ZL’s primary goal of providing a data-driven approach to quality patient care and creating an environment of continuous quality improvement. Under the direction of the Chief Medical Officer, and working with clinical department leads and various other stakeholders, he or she will define functional requirements, collaborate with technical staff to design electronic systems, and manage ongoing processes of data collection, data management and systems administration.  He or she will be the main point of contact between HUM and the Boston-based Medical Informatics team, as well as third-party software vendors.

Primary responsibilities:

1.      Develop standard operating procedures to guide the collection of data from OpenMRS, OpenBoxes, and associated paper-based systems.

2.      Design and implement data management practices to ensure that data collected at the hospital is timely, accurate, consistent, relevant and reliable.

3.      Work with hospital leadership to determine staffing needs to support data collection and data management at HUM; lead the recruitment, hiring and training of these staff.

4.      Develop training plans for onboarding new clinical and clerical staff at HUM, in conjunction with clinical leadership.

5.      Define requirements for Internet networking, application servers databases, and other systems required to support Informatics systems at the hospital, and work with the IT team to ensure that these requirements are met.

6.      Produce useful data from OpenMRS and OpenBoxes using database queries and available reporting frameworks.

7.      Collect feedback from HUM leadership to guide the improvement of OpenMRS and OpenBoxes; deliver concise, prioritized requirements to the Boston-based Medical Informatics team and third-party consultants such as ThoughtWorks.

8.      Provide mentorship to local staff, allowing them to take on tasks of increasing complexity over time.

9.      Improve standards for data quality and EMR workflows and processes.

Qualifications:

1.      Excellent management and communication skills

2.      Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or another relevant field, Master's Degree preferred

3.      Knowledge and experience in the following areas:

a.      Web application development

b.      MySQL

c.      Linux server administration

d.      Network administration

4.      Experience with GIS, and statistical software packages a plus

5.      At least two years experience in technical project management

6.      Comfortable living in a rural area with ability to take initiative and work with minimal direction

7.      Demonstrated experience at working well with senior and peer management, all levels of end users,     and peers in high-pressure situations and complex environments 

8.      Fluent in English; proficiency in either French or Haitian Creole a plus

9.      Exposure to issues relevant to public health and international development