Data management system assesment: A global surgical aid organization case study

While international surgical humanitarian organizations can reduce the global burden of surgical disease and improve healthcare infrastructure in developing countries, the overall impact on the lives of those treated is difficult to quantify. Given the challenging environments in which they operate, these aid groups face substantial problems associated with providing services, collecting and maintaining patient health information as well as tracking indicators of quality and longer-term outcomes. Surgical charities suffer from lacking transparency and accountability: a direct result of not recording and openly reporting on their practices and results.;Although their use and potential strengths are well established, electronic health records have not been applied in the field during surgical missions. Recent innovations in mobile health software solutions, real­time connectivity, and portability of hardware have opened the door to implementing electronic health records in challenging environments. Such technological advances can be leveraged to solve the unmet data management needs of humanitarian organizations, thus improving on-site patient tracking and operational efficiency as well as patient outcome and quality control analysis. Electronic data collection and distribution from these resource­limited settings may play a significant factor in advancing the establishment of international surgical practice guidelines.;Operation Smile is a global surgical charity dedicated to the treatment of congenital facial deformities. To audit outcomes and improve quality of care, the organization translates information from existing pen-and-paper medical records to a basic system of electronic databases. Yet, significant challenges to research and reporting persist due to a lack of state-of-the­art data management strategies.;This thesis will elucidate the design and development of an electronic data management application that collects, processes, and distributes information. The design of the system is based on first-hand experience with Operation Smile missions and an attempt to use mission data for outcomes assessment. The proposed solution will be an invaluable resource for real-time mission-based patient management as well as a constantly updated investigational database for the study of disease etiology and surgical outcomes in cleft care in the developing world.