Butte to Nigeria:

By Holly Michels - 02/23/2008

Rogers

A representative of a Butte-based health care information technology center is traveling to Nigeria with a local medical group to find ways to teach doctors there how to safely deliver newborns.

The project, called the African Family Medicine Education and Development Initiate, is a partnership of the National Center for Health Care Informatics at Montana Tech and Maternal Life International.

The group leaves Sunday.

During the two-week trip, Informatics Chief Executive Officer Ray Rogers will assess ways to provide training to Nigerian doctors to promote safe births and combat malaria, tuberculosis and mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus.

“The idea behind our program is ... to establish some method-ologies by which we can actually train physicians in Nigeria using distance education,” Rogers said.

Maternal Life has provided a program called Safe Passages since 2003 that aims to reduce maternal deaths and prevent the transmission of AIDS from mother to child.

Physicians in Nigeria don’t learn how to perform Caesarian sections and other life-saving procedures to deliver babies safely and protect their mothers, Rogers said.

Informatics will use distance education technology operated from the Montana Tech campus to communicate via video and teleconferencing. Rogers will work out of Our Lady of the Apostles Hospital in Jos, a city of about 510,000 in the center of Nigeria.

Rogers said Nigeria depends on satellites to provide 98 percent of the country’s Internet access, an expensive method that doesn’t provide much bandwidth. He will run live transmission tests during the trip and try to connect the hospital with Montana Tech’s campus.

“We will look at using everything from this Polycom technol-ogy, a kind of higher-end video conferencing with the ability to set up cameras and microphones,” Rogers said.

“At this point we don’t know what will work,” Rogers said. “We’ll know a whole lot more when we get there.” Informatics will also try to incorporate simple, off-the-shelf free technology like Skype, a software program that allows users to make telephone calls over the Internet.

— Reporter Holly Michels may be reached via e-mail at holly.michels@lee.net