I&E 263S: Problem Solving Global Health
Course Description:
Problem Solving Global Health is designed to enable students to understand and harness the power of Entrepreneurship as behavior and practice. This course included information in several main sections: overview, theory of change, needs analysis, interventions, resource strategies, operational issues, evaluations and outcomes and culminates in a project for an innovator project. The course included various exercises, debate activities, interactive conversations, intersessions with fieldtrips off-campus, providing us with an experiential and interdisciplinary approach to learning the fundamental principles and application of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Students were encouraged to ambitiously step out of their comfort zone and into a new realm of learning and action. The class was divided into groups of 3- 5 students who worked as a team throughout the semester to come up with a promising solution to a current issue in healthcare.
Problem Solving Global Health is designed to enable students to understand and harness the power of Entrepreneurship as behavior and practice. This course included information in several main sections: overview, theory of change, needs analysis, interventions, resource strategies, operational issues, evaluations and outcomes and culminates in a project for an innovator project. The course included various exercises, debate activities, interactive conversations, intersessions with fieldtrips off-campus, providing us with an experiential and interdisciplinary approach to learning the fundamental principles and application of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Students were encouraged to ambitiously step out of their comfort zone and into a new realm of learning and action. The class was divided into groups of 3- 5 students who worked as a team throughout the semester to come up with a promising solution to a current issue in healthcare.
Reflection:
The reason I registered to take Problem Solving Global Health was becuase I was looking for a course that combined my interests in public health work and entrepreneurship. I knew that these two fields of study combined could be a force of change for the future of healthcare, so I was eager to learn the necessary skills to contribute to this change. After completing the I&E 263S, I realized that the course went beyond my expectations. I was not only able to further my learnings in healthcare and entrepreneurship, but also discover a new passion in the field of strategy and management consulting. This new discovery prompted to join an on-campus organization, Duke Impact Investing Group (DIIG), as a Consulting Analyst to help me gain further experience that would help me in pursuing consulting as a career post graduation.
Key Learnings:
The reason I registered to take Problem Solving Global Health was becuase I was looking for a course that combined my interests in public health work and entrepreneurship. I knew that these two fields of study combined could be a force of change for the future of healthcare, so I was eager to learn the necessary skills to contribute to this change. After completing the I&E 263S, I realized that the course went beyond my expectations. I was not only able to further my learnings in healthcare and entrepreneurship, but also discover a new passion in the field of strategy and management consulting. This new discovery prompted to join an on-campus organization, Duke Impact Investing Group (DIIG), as a Consulting Analyst to help me gain further experience that would help me in pursuing consulting as a career post graduation.
Key Learnings:
- When developing a product, strategy plan or anything else for a target community, it is important to include that community in the conversation. If you do not include these individuals in the design and/or development conversations, then it may be more challenging for them to accept the idea becuase it may not reflect their values and/or goals. Drive change with a Human-Centered Design way of thinking.
- When working with an innovator, it is important to know how to ask the right probing questions to reveal where the actual problem lies. Probing questions are useful when trying to deeply understand and issue beyond the surface level.
- When creating a team, it is important to make sure that every individual has a diverse way of thinking. A diverse team leads to more creativity and better informed decision making/problem-solving skills.
Artifact:
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NURSD Pitch:
My team and I decided to collaborate with a non-profit organization called Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) to discuss what aspects of their home care management operations required improvement. After speaking with officials in CCNC, they explained to us how their challenges were present in scheduling appointments, exchanges of patient information, wasted travel time, and overall communication between the member care coordinator, patient, and nurse. My team and I were able to deduce that the main reason for these challenges was because CCNC only used phone calls to pass on information. The phone calls proved to be burdensome because it was too time-consuming and difficult for the nurses to remember all of a patient’s information.
After having several more conversations with CCNC and doing extensive research, my team and I were able to develop a demo of an app that would help to mitigate their challenges. The key features included were a queue of scheduled patient appointments, digitalized patient forms, a navigation tool that would automatically direct a nurse to the next patient, and a “contact administrator” option for easy communication between the three parties.
I primarily worked on the Problem Definition and Target Audience section of the paper. We all worked together to develop the slideshow presentation.
My team and I decided to collaborate with a non-profit organization called Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) to discuss what aspects of their home care management operations required improvement. After speaking with officials in CCNC, they explained to us how their challenges were present in scheduling appointments, exchanges of patient information, wasted travel time, and overall communication between the member care coordinator, patient, and nurse. My team and I were able to deduce that the main reason for these challenges was because CCNC only used phone calls to pass on information. The phone calls proved to be burdensome because it was too time-consuming and difficult for the nurses to remember all of a patient’s information.
After having several more conversations with CCNC and doing extensive research, my team and I were able to develop a demo of an app that would help to mitigate their challenges. The key features included were a queue of scheduled patient appointments, digitalized patient forms, a navigation tool that would automatically direct a nurse to the next patient, and a “contact administrator” option for easy communication between the three parties.
I primarily worked on the Problem Definition and Target Audience section of the paper. We all worked together to develop the slideshow presentation.