We'll work with organization in India, Chhattisgarh-based Jan Swashtya Sahayog, which serves rural populations in India’s poorest state. One of its founding physicians, the inspiring Yogesh Jain, and I have mapped out a fabulous opportunity for students.
Students scout for and assess ideas, technologies, contacts, connections, and information that could prove useful to JSS in four focal areas:
- How can JSS make even better use of patient groups (currently they run over two dozen) to help the many patients it serves with chronic conditions, including alcohol addiction? What can we glean about how to do this effectively?
- How to equip health workers to formulate better questions, search strategies, requests for help? Given that JSS, like many organizations in low-resource settings, relies on locally-educated 8th or 10th grade graduates for frontline care, how can they help support these workers, who are smart and dedicated, in honing their problem-solving, help-seeking, and other skills within the JSS system (which includes family home visits, camps, local clinics, and tertiary hospitals)—and to create shared learning across levels and locations?
- Over the years, JSS staff saw many needs for appropriate technologies for healthcare, and have steadily built a collection of their own inventions in their home-grown lab. How can we help them do this even more efficiently and effectively—and leverage what we have access to here at MIT?
- There are plenty of guidelines for good antenatal care, but the realities of frontline care in rural settings in India present a very different set of options. Can we help JSS design a sequence of visits, specify guidelines and tests, and think through the information gathering, communication, and planning requirements to make the most of their staff, clinics, hospitals, and other assets to ensure that all the mothers they serve get high-quality healthcare?
You may have learned of JSS from their innovations with community health workers pioneering the ASHA village health worker model, now nationally scaled; their investment in training rural nurses; their focus on hunger, TB, surgery, NCDs (Yogesh Jain serves on the Lancet Commission on NCDs and poverty, and is hosting the Commission in Bilaspur soon), their chronic care innovations, and more; their pro-poor policy advocacy in the state of Chhattisgarh and more broadly, up to the Indian Supreme Court; their need-driven local appropriate technology innovations; or their collaboration with Thoughtworks on Bahmni, an open-source hospital system for healthcare providers.
Key materials for all students and key context on the organization and its setting is in this introductory folder: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/czqosgyhlo88r3a/AACn2NqJR-stirt9SqI9HPGRa?dl=0
Collected resources from courseteam and JSS materials for each team are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/30rcugb4xu0wcya/AACslW2kJslGL2wuuu_5Zfkxa?dl=0 – personas are here too.
Extra resources on systems thinking, behavioral perspectives, design thinking are here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ifwo1mb7e8bbyip/AAD-8X8iXkR4Vs5xh4GPKUE_a?dl=0
youtube channel for students: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLiX56tFrfnrTUMgzZUSIPtnpBHteT8VX
Team rosters, team Meeting Schedule and Expert Bios: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x2mZd0tEMHUcOXs82TUatGC4scSE7iwa5lKAQObBitI/edit?usp=sharing
JSS staff on your team calls and contact info: JSSTeamMemberProfilesMITConsultationMarch2016.pdf
In-class handouts: JSS MIT Consultation 2016 Key Questions.pdf and MIT-JSS innovation sprint for students.docx – latter includes our phone numbers. NB Anjali Sastry office is 617 253-0965, E62-433
Slides from intro class: Sastry JSS-MIT Day1 ClassSlides 16.03.14.pdf
Deliverables template: JSS-MIT Student deliverables template 16.03.14.ppt
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