Community Health Surveillance

The Community Health project was started this semester as a collaboration between Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries and physicians working with the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina. The goal of the Community Health project is ultimately to treat the large number of chronic hypertension cases in the Central Plateau of Haiti. Hypertension can easily be treated with affordable medication that is readily available in the United States. However, this medication is not available to many residents of the Central Plateau. A program is currently in place in which patients in the Central Plateau are diagnosed with hypertension at health clinics run annually by American practitioners Dr. Harry Morse, Dr. Glen Quattlebaum, and Will Mayo, APRN. Local community health workers called the Agent de Sante then distribute the patients’ medication monthly and check their blood pressure to make sure their treatment is working. The problem is that the reliability of this method is largely unknown. The focus of the Community Health project for this year has been evaluating the current method of distributing the medication. Creating a database to store patient data and track their treatment outcomes will ensure the effectiveness of community health workers. Data such as the patient’s blood pressure, dosage changes, and any symptoms of hypotension will be added monthly to the database. Matching patient data to their identity has been a problem in the past, as many patients do not know their birthdate and there is a language barrier between patients and practitioners.