[MUSIC]
My name is Paul Serato.
I'm a master's student in the Department of Management Science and Engineering.
This past summer I interned at Ruai Family Hospital healthcare,
which is a private hospital system that offers not only high quality,
low cost services to lower income families.
But also offers premium outpatient and
specialist services to the greater Nairobi community.
Kenya has universal health coverage that provides public insurance to
all of its citizens.
This insurance won't cover the complete cost of a consultation.
There's a disparity between access to healthcare services based on income.
So, being part of an organization that,
specifically tailored to lower income families was particularly important and
also particularly challenging because these populations are the ones who
often need the care the most but are unable to afford them.
I worked on a few projects during my time there.
Initially my project was meant to develop a data collection tool for
patient satisfaction.
During the time of my internship,
Ruai Family Hospital was in a period of expansion.
And during this expansion they really wanted to know
how patients felt about their services.
Coming in, I had to develop a tool, a surveying tool that would allow them to
not only collect the data, but also store the data and analyze the data so that they
can make better informed decisions about how to best serve their patients.
Second project that I worked on had to do with organizing their
patient filing system.
Ruai Family Hospital do not have no electronic health record system at their
specials hospital.
Because they're on their paper-based system,
I helped them organize the way they kept and maintain their patient records to
facilitate a more efficient, streamlined approach to treating patients and
getting patient information for any given outpatient visit.
Towards the end of the internship Ruai Family Hospital, specialist hospital,
was able to transition to an electronic health record system.
So I help facilitate that transition and ultimately assisted
their IT department with updating their health management information system.
Being able to focus on those systemic
components that we could fix to ultimately help people do their jobs
a little bit more efficiently was the over arching theme in my internship.
Te working environment at Ruai was very friendly, very collaborative.
And the part that most left the lasting impression on me was the fact
that they really considered and really listened to my opinion and
my analysis of the their existing system.
And the fact that they were able to do that distinguished it from,
I guess a lot of the health care systems here in the US.
Here it's very difficult to get access to different levels of the organization and
hospital organizations.
Being able to travel abroad and work and live in Kenya impacted me very much so
personally because it really highlighted the privilege that I have being able to
get an education and have this experience from Stanford to travel to this
other country and learn and grow within this context.
I had already grown to appreciate the value of education given that I'm a first
generation college student, and I come from a low income background, these
experiences just never would have been possible for me and it was unimaginable.
And so being in the space, just made it that much more,
more real and made me appreciate it a lot more.
So one of the best trips that I had during Kenya was a trip to Mount Suswa which is
this volcano and
it was really amazing because we got a chance to go camping there overnight.
And during the night you could hear the baboons in the distance.
And it turns out like there is a cave that we're all doing that boons kind of
all congregate.
They call it the baboon parliament.
We actually had a guide, who took us deep inside a cave.
It was like pitch dark at this point so
you couldn't see anything, there like spiders like crawling all over the place.
And then all of a sudden the guide, shines his light up on the ceiling, and you can
see literally thousands of bats covering the entire ceiling, flying everywhere.
And they were also using echo location to kind of
capture the insects that were flying in the cave.
So that was a really cool experience,
just being able to get to appreciate nature in its most preserved form.
[MUSIC]
This internship experience helped me understand the universality
of some of the problems that health care systems have in common.
So in Kenya,
one of the key issues that they have right now is very long patient waiting times.
A patient can visit a public hospital and wait up to ten hours just for
simple outpatient clinic.
You can imagine the implications of that that's an entire day of missing work,
of missing being with your family, of being able to live your normal life.
And so these kind of issues exist elsewhere in the world.
It's a global issue.
For me, this experience really highlighted the need for
that cross cultural communication to ultimately figure
out what the best solutions are for health systems,
not only in United States or in Kenya but globally.
[MUSIC]