How much is it worth to a hospital to lower its readmissions rate? How do you build a patient privacy policy in the absence of any regulation or market demand telling you to? Is there a way to prepare a surgical theater more efficiently without compromising safety? These are just some of the challenges our interns took on this summer.
With support from the SEAD program, Innovations in Healthcare expanded its summer internship program this year to include graduate students in policy, business and medicine. Innovations in Healthcare selected, trained and matched six talented students with innovator organizations to work on 10-week strategic projects this summer. Interns spent time in the Cayman Islands, Kenya, Uganda, India and Colombia.
Betty Tushabe, a lawyer from Rwanda and a student in the Masters in International Development program at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, worked with MicroClinic Technologies in Nairobi to develop a data privacy policy for their digital health record system. “I gained an in-depth understanding of how e-health may be the future of improving health services in developing world.” Betty said about her project this summer. “The internship experience helped me refocus my future goals and I now want to delve further into the realm of data security and implications on the use of technology today.”
MicroEnsure, an insurance provider targeting low-income markets, hosted intern Jared Schnefke, a former Deloitte consultant and current MBA student at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. “Jared developed tools to project future revenues for the most complex product we've ever designed,” said Mario Ariza, MicroEnsure’s Regional Engagement Manager for Africa. “Now that we have a robust model to help us understand the impact of our assumptions, we are much more confident in our decision-making.”
Three of the summer interns, based in Kenya and Uganda, also partnered with Innovations in Healthcare’s Nairobi office and Kenyatta University to put on a session for Kenyatta students about business planning for social innovations.
Each of the interns will be describing their summer projects and experiences on our blog in the coming weeks – stay tuned to read more! In the meantime, here are some photos and tweets.
Innovations in Healthcare will solicit summer project proposals from network innovators in February for the 2016 summer internship program. For more information, contact Andrea Taylor.