BDU Workshop

ISSIP, in collaboration with Mayo Clinic, Bahir Dar University, the University of New Hampshire (UNH), IBM,  Marquette University,  Northwestern University, and Avant Education Concepts held a very lively  workshop on April 29-30 at Bahir Dar University (BDU), Bahir Dar, Ethiopia titled “Service Innovation In Medical and Engineering Education”.    The effort led by Dr. Zalalem Temesgen (Zami), Fellow Infectious Disease, Mayo Clinic, ISSIP Ambassador to biomedical community and Mayo Clinic, and championed locally by Dr Getachew Muluken, Dean of School Medicine, BDU,  intended to convene professionals from various disciplines, both local and external, as well as from government and the corporate world to begin a collaboration to help scale medical education in Africa.   “Africa has a huge burden of disease and the poorest physician to population ratio in the world.” says Zami whose vision is to scale medical education to help solve the problems of healthcare in Africa.   Zami has been getting a lot of support around this grand challenge and hopes more ISSIP members will join him in the future.

The workshop began on the morning of April 29th, and ended in the afternoon of April 30th (The slides will become available soon on the ISSIP website).  About  total of 35,  mostly faculty and college administrators,  and a handful of PhD students attended.  The audience by design was diverse representing not only the school of medicine, but civil, electrical, mechanical, chemical and other engineering disciplines, plus representatives from local government, active NGOs, and Faculty from Addis University.

Zami opened the session by sharing his vision of improved healthcare in Africa, and stated the goals of the workshop and our visit. He said “ISSIP and Service Science provides a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration”, and that the university had all the elements to help scale the quality of healthcare in the area, and that we were there to help. He also said that our goals was not only to learn from each other, but also to end the workshop with some tangible next steps and action items that helps the university leadership achieve their future goals.

Following Zami, Dr. Matebe Tafere, Vice President of Academic Affairs, spoke about the history of the university and shared its grand vision “to become one of the first top 10 universities in Africa by 2025″.  He emphasized that service innovation, and service delivery is very important to the university.  “Service engineering is a core mission of humans, and service quality has to be measured by the customer.”  He said that the university strives to continually improve it capabilities to improve its service quality.   “Quality is affected by input, process, output, and process takes leadership.  If leadership is strong the process can be improved.”  He closed by saying that the university’s strong focus is to develop leadership, and that events like the one organized with ISSIP drive that focus.

We then heard from several BDU faculty and administrators about the university challenges and opportunities. Challenges include unreliable power, water, telecommunication, internet connectivity; insufficient quality instructors, low salaries,  limited career options,  heavy teaching loads, inadequate support staff;  inadequate equipment including laptops and computers; inadequate physical facilities such as  lecture halls, libraries, hostels, offices, and recreational areas. On the positive side, the government is pouring a lot of money to build infrastructure and improve education and therefore is very supportive of university’s push for innovation.

I, then presented an overview of service science, and the increasing capabilities that enable us to address complex, grand challenges in our human-centered institutions, (i.e. service systems: school, universities, companies, cities, countries,…).  I talked about how convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, and other technologies is changing the nature of value generation from transactional to relational, resulting in tremendous innovation opportunities for value co-creation between service providers, customers and their supporting ecosystems.  I also talked about the importance of “T-shape” individuals, and organizations, those that are very deep in at least one area discipline, yet have developed a wide breath of knowledge across many areas, those with high IQ as well as EQ who can spot and take advantage of the tremendous opportunities at the intersection traditional boundaries.   I then provided an overview of how ISSIP members are collaborating with each other to impact education, research, practice, professional development, and policies in service innovation, and closed by citing some possibilities for value co-creation between ISSIP and Bahir Dar University.

Dr Andrzej  Rucinksi, Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering, UNH and ISSIP Ambassador,  presented the details of a course he had launched at UNH after being inspired by the idea of “T-shape” at ISSIP.   The course, “EC777″, brings students from engineering and business schools together to form project-based teams around entrepreneurial grand challenges that impact business and society.  So far, the course has resulted in several outstanding entrepreneurial ventures, and we had the pleasure of hearing from one of the entrepreneurs.

Liquinet whose “mission is to create networking tools that will empower people around the world to monitor, maintain, and own community water sources.” is the  brainchild of Ian Gagnon, Student of Mechanical Engineering, UNH.  Ian  identified the need for his invention during his trips to Uganda as a volunteer with Engineers-without-borders, and  launched the company while taking the EC777 course.

Dr Lars Olson, Interim Chair of Biomedical Engineering, Marquette University presented another example of innovation program for the region:  ”Human Powered Nebulizer”, a program designed to help patients who suffer from severe pulmonary diseases and have no access to electricity.

Dr.  Meenal Pore, IBM Research, Nairobi, Kenya, talked about the interest of IBM Research in “commercially viable solutions that impact people’s lives”.  She emphasized that IBM is very focused on services and analytics in general, and in Africa IBM is helping service innovation in government, and smarter healthcare leveraging Big Data.   Sources of data include national health registries, Telcos, humanitarian data, traditional media, satellite imagery, provider generated, citizen generated (crowd-sourced).  She talked about how during the Sierra Leon Ebola crisis, IBM helped set up a “citizen engagement platform” that was instrumental in the efforts to contain the outbreak.   Meenal talked about the possibility of scaling medical education with the help of Watson.

The second day, April 30th, the workshop  was broken into two parts.   During the first part, Doctors Lars Olson,  Matt Glucksberg,  Yacob Astatke, and Andrzej Rucinski provided an overview of their respective curriculums.  By the end of the end of this first part, it became obvious that the idea of a new Biomedical engineering program at BDU was  gaining strong traction.

During the second part Zami brought the workshop to a close by reviewing major highlights of the 2-days, and echoing  possible area for future collaboration that emerged including curriculum development, faculty and leadership development, assignments for BDU faculty to one of the US universities who visited or other ISSIP faculty members to complete post graduate work, possibility of service thinking training completion and certification.  The take away action items: the BDU faculty and administrators to form interdisciplinary task force to assess future job opportunities, curriculum development requirements(context based for the country), resources and infrastructure requirements, and devise an action plan and collaboration proposal.

During the entire workshop, the audience appeared to stay engaged throughout.  Here are some random feedback:

“So, service science is about think globally, act locally.” –  an MD, faculty
“Leadership development is about broadening the T.” – Dr. Temesgen
“This [workshop] opened our eyes to collaborate with Institute of Technology  in areas related to EKG, EEG, and others.” –  an MD, faculty
“We learned a lot today, I wish more students like us could attend this workshop.” – one of the students, School of Medicine
“We need to make sure that our engineering colleagues build the biomed curriculum with consideration of the needs of the school of medicine.” – One of the MD, faculty,  ”If we stay focused on service, we will ensure to work together” – one of the Engineering faculty:
“One of the best workshops I have attended.” – One of the Engineering Faculty

Later that evening we had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Baylie Damtie Yeshita, President of BDU  over dinner who shared with us that the university efforts, supported by the government are hugely focused on entrepreneurial venture, and manufacturing, as well as on creating communities that are up to par with standard of living using smart technologies as part of national effort for a smarter Ethiopia.  Dr Yshita told us that his #1 preoccupation as the president of a 45000 student university with ~ 7000 graduating each year, is to not only supply skilled workers for existing jobs, but to “create jobs and keep the engine going.”

Source: yassimoghaddam.com