Partnerships between academic medical center (AMCs) in North America and the developing world are uniquely capable of fulfilling the tripartite needs of care, training, and research required to address health care crises in the developing world. Moreover, the institutional resources and credibility of AMCs can provide the foundation to build systems of care with long-term sustainability, even in resource-poor settings. The authors describe a partnership between Indiana University School of Medicine and Moi University and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kenya that demonstrates the power of an academic medical partnership in its response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Through the Academic Model for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV/AIDS, the partnership currently treats over 40,000 HIV-positive patients at 19 urban and rural sites in western Kenya, now enrolls nearly 2,000 new HIV positive patients every month, feeds up to 30,000 people weekly, enables economic security, fosters HIV prevention, tests more than 25,000 pregnant women annually for HIV, engages communities, and is developing a robust electronic information system. The partnership evolved from a program of limited size and a focus on general internal medicine into one of the largest and most comprehensive HIV/AIDS-control systems in sub-Saharan Africa. The partnership's rapid increase in scale, combined with the comprehensive and long-term approach to the region's health care needs, provides a twinning model that can and should be replicated to address the shameful fact that millions are dying of preventable and treatable diseases in the developing world.

Antiretroviral treatment of adult Kenyans in this cohort resulted in significant and persistent clinical and immunological benefit. These findings document the viability and effectiveness of large-scale HIV treatment initiatives in resource-limited settings.

The authors implemented an electronic medical record system in a rural Kenyan health center. Visit data are recorded on a paper encounter form, eliminating duplicate documentation in multiple clinic logbooks. Data are entered into an MS-Access database supported by redundant power systems. The system was initiated in February 2001, and 10,000 visit records were entered for 6,190 patients in six months. The authors present a summary of the clinics visited, diagnoses made, drugs prescribed, and tests performed. After system implementation, patient visits were 22% shorter. They spent 58% less time with providers (p < 0.001) and 38% less time waiting (p = 0.06). Clinic personnel spent 50% less time interacting with patients, two thirds less time interacting with each other, and more time in personal activities. This simple electronic medical record system has bridged the "digital divide." Financial and technical sustainability by Kenyans will be key to its future use and development.

BackgroundThe Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH) has been a model academic partnership in global health for nearly three decades, leveraging the power of a public-sector academic medical center and the tripartite academic mission – service, education, and research – to the challenges of delivering health care in a low-income setting. Drawing our mandate from the health needs of the population, we have scaled up service delivery for HIV care, and over the last decade, expanded our focus on non-communicable chronic diseases, health system strengthening, and population health more broadly. Success of such a transformative endeavor requires new partnerships, as well as a unification of vision and alignment of strategy among all partners involved. Leveraging the Power of Partnerships and Spreading the Vision for Population Health. We describe how AMPATH built on its collective experience as an academic partnership to support the public-sector health care system, with a major focus on scaling up HIV care in western Kenya, to a system poised to take responsibility for the health of an entire population. We highlight global trends and local contextual factors that led to the genesis of this new vision, and then describe the key tenets of AMPATH’s population health care delivery model: comprehensive, integrated, community-centered, and financially sustainable with a path to universal health coverage. Finally, we share how AMPATH partnered with strategic planning and change management experts from the private sector to use a novel approach called a ‘Learning Map®’ to collaboratively develop and share a vision of population health, and achieve strategic alignment with key stakeholders at all levels of the public-sector health system in western Kenya.ConclusionWe describe how AMPATH has leveraged the power of partnerships to move beyond the traditional disease-specific silos in global health to a model focused on health systems strengthening and population health. Furthermore, we highlight a novel, collaborative tool to communicate our vision and achieve strategic alignment among stakeholders at all levels of the health system. We hope this paper can serve as a roadmap for other global health partners to develop and share transformative visions for improving population health globally.

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