The goal of the MundoComm initiative is to develop an innovative training program that enhances the ability of community-based teams in Latin America to use ICT for maternal health improvement. Evidence demonstrates the feasibility and potential of ICT to impact maternal health, which continues to be an intransigent problem for much of the world, including Latin America. Costa Rica is a regional hub for technology and health in Latin America and serves as the base for this initiative. This project directly emerges from a previously NIH Fogarty- funded ITMI project (InfoComm) that focused on building a generation of informatics-trained public health physicians in Costa Rica and two subsequent NIH-funded trials (one through Fogarty) in the Dominican Republic. This project links the two former Fogarty PIs at the University of Rochester Medical Center with their Fogarty trainees and other faculty from three medical schools (Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, and US), one technology school (Costa Rica), and community organizations to foster cross-collaboration, technological innovation and expanded use of ICT to improve maternal health in the region.
Specific aims i nclude: 1) Developing a mentored training program for applied research teams from throughout Latin America to learn about ICT applications in maternal health; 2) Testing specific team ICT innovations in field settings to demonstrate feasibility and appropriateness for local context; 3) Creating a Collaboratory where stakeholders share developing material, comment on plans, and provide support for trainees in the innovation process; and 4) Stimulating development of a professional network of ICT, medical, public health professionals with students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners devoted to supporting ICT for Maternal Health in Latin America. MundoComm will train multidisciplinary teams of public health and community professionals in a mentored environment with core and technical faculty, through a combination of didactic, experiential, and distance-based methods. The mode of instruction is engaging, experiential, and team-oriented, leveraging communications modalities (e.g. social networking, crowd-sourcing) to create visibility and feedback mechanisms for community-led ICT prototypes feasibility testing. A summative-formative evaluation process coincides with the project to help describe and evaluate the training model and the ICT innovations that result from the trainees' efforts. By training multidisciplinary teams and promoting tools of collaboration, partnership, and engagement, the project hopes to sustain effort toward using ICT for public health improvement.
MundoComm builds upon its predecessor InfoComm to strengthen applied informatics training in Costa Rica and in Latin America. MundoComm focuses specifically on matching community-based teams with faculty and technical mentors to develop ICT interventions to address maternal health improvement through a structured 12-month training period of online and in-person activities. The project brings together medical, technological, and community resources to promote local engagement in the ICT prototype and development process to help teams learn about the opportunities and local context for implementing ICT interventions to address maternal health.
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