Finishing up my Mhirt experience

This week we gave our final presentation of the internship that covered all of our research and findings. We gave an hour and a half long presentation that was in English and Spanish and illustrated the challenges and benefits of mobile health in rural Nicaragua. We summarized the 24 interviews conducted with community health workers with a series of informative graphs and commentary. The primary findings were that access to signal and not enough technological training are the principle challenges to implementing mobile healthcare in these communities. However, the benefits could be far reaching and transformative. The community health workers said mobile health could aid them in a variety ways, including:  having a healthcare database to become more knowledgable about health issues in the community, communicating with experts and AMOS instantly, being able to access normally unaccessible patients, giving medical reminders, and other issues that could potentially save lives.

After we presented the material, we received a flow of thanks and encouragement about our work. The AMOS team assured us that this data and our analysis will be extremely helpful in moving forward with mobile health in rural Nicaragua. After 8 weeks of research, analysis, meetings, and work, it felt incredible to hear this. The hardest part about this internship has been missing out on seeing the impact of our work. We should be in Nicaragua meeting people, learning from them, and seeing first hand what our work will contribute to. However, hearing the thanks and encouragement from these AMOS workers on the ground made it feel real. I hope to get to Nicaragua someday and meet some of these incredible people, but for now I will settle with the knowledge that I played a small part in furthering healthcare in some of these communities.

I am adding this picture, the final slide of our presentation, as we received so much help and guidance throughout this entire process.

It would have not been possible without all of them and their selfless efforts.