TF

When I try to imagine. I just can’t. I want to help somehow.

Transforming Cleft (https://transformingfaces.org/) is a charity that supports Comprehensive Cleft Care (CCC) for people born with cleft (donate here: https://give-can.keela.co/gentient.) A neighbour was working on a volunteer project with them and convinced me to I had to get involved.   She had taken on a project with Catalyste+   https://www.catalysteplus.org/) and wanted some technical help.

She is one of the busiest and most productive people I know, and here she took on one more thing.   And now, I am in it too. Oh great. There goes my free time.

However, it is gut wrenching to imagine what it must be like to have to feel the social rejection that comes with a cleft for your child.  In Ethiopia, many parents face stigma for the difference in their child, leading to a  break up .  It is  devastating. I couldn’t stay on the sidelines. I had to help.

We used an open source program called Bahmni to give them a medical records system. Bahmni is a very good system, highly configurable, and used in 1,500 different production settings. We configured it to mirror their excellent practices, which are aligned to the global standards for CCC.

Comprehensive Cleft Care is more than just surgery; it encompasses nutrition, psychosocial support, speech therapy, ENT services, dental, and orthodontics. It views the patient in a holistic way and treats as many of their needs as they can.

We designed the solution using the Enterprise Architecture pattern “Case Management”, which views the patient as a whole, and identifies what their overall objective is. The case is the container to marshal services to apply to the patient.   They sequence the services so that the patient gets as close as possible to their case objective.  Bahmni helps the team oversee care. We also made sure the results could be traced back so we could report back to donors.  Bahmni enables the team to more easily share case notes across disciplines and centralizes the management of patient data.

I HAVE to add a link to their site and encourage you to help them in their efforts. It is saintly work they do. Please give. Anything will help.  If you can’t afford anything right now, give them your best wishes.

Here is the link.:  https://give-can.keela.co/gentient

I’ll try and get Mary to do a better write up. Don’t tell her.