It’s difficult to imagine now, but the war in Ukraine will eventually end. And when it does, John Chelsom, Ph.D., is ready to help the country rebuild.
Chelsom, the director of the master’s program in Applied Health Informatics at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, recently visited the Ukrainian cities of Rivne and Kiev to meet with government representatives and the local nonprofit group 100% Life.
He’d traveled there before in 2018 as part of a delegation working on behalf of the World Bank to show how telemedicine could be used in rural areas.
Since then, he has worked with Fordham students in the Applied Health Informatics program to show how to tap open-source software to create cost-effective information systems for hospitals and healthcare providers.
“When I started the program, I realized that the open-source software that we had could be implemented in Ukraine, not just for telemedicine, but for electronic health records, generally,” he said.
“There are systems in Ukraine that are far better technically than the ones currently being used in the U.S., but the market there is still vulnerable. When the war is over, there is going to be so much money flooding in for reconstruction, including health care and electronic health records, and the eyes will light up for commercial companies from outside the country.”
Because Chelsom already had connections in Ukraine, it made sense to look into ways to serve the country in the same way that Mishal Ahmed, PCS ‘22, a member of the master’s program inaugural cohort, is working to help children in Benin, Africa.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the ongoing war have paused any progress on health records, but Chelsom is encouraged by the way that telemedicine has actually been used to great effect at field hospitals near the front lines of the war.
In Rivne, he showed representatives with 100% Life how to build an electronic health record using open standards and open-source software called cityEHR. The software gathers healthcare data from different sources, converts them into a single format, and allows them to be analyzed and shared. Clinicians can add models of the data they need for patient care or clinical research and then generate the user interfaces required to gather those data during routine clinical practice.
CityEHR was the software that Ahmed used for her capstone project, and Chelsom expects that master’s students from Ukraine can use and learn from it as well. The program’s current cohort features several students who will take what they’ve learned to non-profits in Nigeria and Pakistan.
Chelsom is hopeful that future students will continue to spread the knowledge of open-source source software to low-income countries around the world.
“Digital health should be making health care way better than it is now, but what’s frustrating is, it’s often an impediment to better health care rather than an enabler, and it can be prohibitively expensive,” he said.
“My frustration drives me to make open-source software and teach programs like the one at Fordham. There is a better way to do this. It will take a long time, but we can do it.”
