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"It's my phone"
Use what you have in your hands.
Earlier this month, one of Kijabe Hospital’s young doctors, Dr. Benard Lango, was speaking to a group of visiting academics and aid organizations from around the world. He was giving a live demonstration of the Banda iMed app – a cutting edge, research-quality patient care tool that the Banda team developed for Kijabe’s inpatient medical team.
Intrigued by Lango’s presentation, the gentleman from the CDC in Atlanta asked, “Where did you get the phone that you use the app on?”
“It’s mine” said Lango.
“Did the ‘program’ provide it?”
“No, it’s my phone.”
“I see. Then did the ‘program’ subsidize it?”
“No. It’s just mine.”
I smiled as I backed Lango: “Good questions. What Dr. Lango and his phone highlight is the reality that this isn’t a program run from the outside. It’s just part of a faith-based, Kenyan hospital doing it’s best to help people. People here tend to get a lot done using whatever tools they have in their hands. They most often don’t have a lot of outside resources.” The visitors loved Lango and what they saw in their short time at Kijabe as much as we loved having them.
This visiting team was on a side trip from the Pan African Health Informatics conference that was being held this month in Nairobi. After the main meetings in town, Andrew and Jeremy from our Banda Health team made a comment that further highlighted the making-the-most-of-available-resources theme: “It seems that our small Banda team has been able to produce more than some of the other teams have who have more resources. It’s an encouragement, and we’re convinced we’ll continue coming up with great solutions for the frontline healthcare heroes we serve.”
In addition to patient-care transforming tools like the patient care improvement app for hospital teams, the Banda team is also rolling out another, much more powerful IT tool and getting it into the hands of small clinic owners. It’s called Banda Go for Clinics. Help us get Banda Go into hundreds of clinics and small hospitals across Kenya.
Thank you for being a part of this with us!
