In the drive to improve healthcare delivery, HIT professionals have the luxury of taking a lot for granted. So attendees at HIIMSS 17 who wander by the Access booth are likely to pause when they see a delivery system from another era: a water pump.
It will not be there to create a theme park-style atmosphere or take attendees back to an earlier time. It will be there to share the work of people who are solving one of the leading health problems of an African nation.
The pump belongs to The Last Well, a nonprofit organization that has one goal: provide access to clean water for every resident of Nigeria.
“We’re healthcare IT and while that’s what we do, that’s not necessarily who we are,” explained Access CEO Tim Elliott. His company was one of the founding sponsors of The Last Well and is providing booth space to help build awareness for the project.
The Last Well launched in 2008 in a Washington, DC-area church with a group of young adults who set out to find a project that would accomplish something meaningful and challenging. Inspired by the story of William Wilberforce who helped end the slave trade in England, they decided their mission would be provide a nation with access to clean water.
They learned that in Nigeria an astounding four million people — comprising sixty percent of the population — did not have access to clean water. The daily routine for many girls in the country is still a four- to seven-hour trip to fetch water for their family.
The project was daunting: a census and detailed maps were not even available. Still, the group set December 2020 as the target date. By then, every Nigerian would have a clean water source within a 15-minute walk.
The general approach will be familiar to anyone who has worked on an IT project, but on an awe-inspiring scale. The group completes 700 to 1,000 projects a year. Each project installs wells that serve up to 600 people, or a gravity-drive filtration system that supplies four to six people.
Todd Phillips, executive director of The Last Well, said that eight years into the project, they are still “assessing the entire nation, going village to village, hut to hut, to know exactly where pumps and filtration systems are needed.”
According to the United Nations, in developing countries, as much as 80 percent of illnesses are linked to poor water conditions. Phillips said that it’s estimated that “5 percent of a population will die because of a lack of access to water.”
The project has raised money mainly from individuals through a network of Christian churches. But more fund-raising will be needed to finish the work on time. Management of the product by Americans is all performed by volunteers, Phillips said, so “all donations go to work in the field.” The twelve-year project is on schedule to reach its goal, with 850,000 Nigerians still in need of a reliable water supply.
Access’s contribution to healthcare is quite a bit different. It focuses on elimination of paper in a hospital. “Our job is to fill in the gaps; find out where the paper is, and if there are forms that need to be signed, we try to turn them into an electronic signature and a tablet,” Elliott said. “It’s all about problem solving.”
Seeing the water pump in Access’s exhibit space will be a powerful reminder that some problems are more pressing than others.
Access will be in booth 1778.
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.
