So today I decided to blog about a topic that is a little outside my comfort zone, Health Informatics, and well… at the center of my “Nirvana”; I’m talking of course about Business Process Mapping (BPM), which I consider to be a cornerstone for running any successful organization.

Recently I started my practicum at a Health Records department in a local hospital in Toronto, as a mandatory part of my post-grad studies, and I made sure to commit more hours than those required for my practicum, for the soul purpose of performing a thorough quality study of the department’s processes. Being a fan of Six Sigma, I worked on developing my own variation of one of its tools (SIPOC) to document and evaluate business processes.

Let us start with the template flowchart I developed:

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So the weekend is finally over and personally I wish it never did. That is how much I enjoyed the Random Hacks of Kindness Hackathon and being around every individual that participated in the event. Over the course of two days, I had the privilege of working with a team of remarkable individuals to help me bring my idea of a wound classification system to life. Although the weekend ended without finishing a working prototype, our team won 3rd prize based on our conceptual design.

First prize was awarded for Messages without Connectivity communication model, that allows the exchange of messages when cell towers are down (absolutely remarkable). I remember participating in recent discussions with a few of my friends in Syria that wanted to figure out how to do this in case the government cut down communication to isolate the protesters, and it is great to see that a group of my fellow hackers were able to create a working model. The second prize went to Bacon, an alert phone app that sends alerts once activated with the individual’s whereabouts.

So, to talk specifically about my team’s project, we were working on developing a system that allows volunteers to take images of wounds in a refugee camp, add demographic information to that image, then send the info to a central server where physicians can view the images, triage the wounds, and send back instructions to volunteers. Below is the flowchart we developed for this process:

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