Careers: Using IT To Improve Medicine Here And AbroadCareers: Using IT To Improve Medicine Here And Abroad

Anthony Draye, the new CIO at Liberty Pacific Medical Imaging, is only 27. But he's already packed a world of impressive work and good deeds into the eight years he's been involved with information technology.

As Liberty Pacific’s first CIO, Draye is assessing new technologies and overseeing day-to-day IT operations and infrastructure, including picture-archiving-and-communications and radiology-information systems, for the company’s three California medical diagnostic imaging centers, as well as the four centers under development. But when he's not managing the tech for Liberty Pacific, the Seattle native volunteers his expertise to advance medical care thousands of miles away in poor rural communities of Ghana, West Africa.

A math graduate of the University of Washington class of 2000, Draye's interest in helping Third World nations through IT was sparked about four years ago when his cousin, who was studying international public health, invited him to a social dinner at the university's campus. One of the guests was Dr. Anthony Ofosu, who was from Ghana, where he's a regional health director and only physician in an impoverished district of 100,000 people.

Draye, who was working as a software engineer for a small telecom company that went belly up, struck up a rapport with Ofosu, who had ideas for using technology to improve Ghana's health care systems. But, Ofosu said, no one there could implement those ideas.

That encounter got Draye going on his health IT mission. "It was a fortuitous meeting," says Draye, who in his free time developed a Java-based drug-stock management system and later a PDA-based childhood-immunization record system, both now being used in several regions by Ghana Health Services. The drug-stock management system gives health officials a better handle on the country's scant funding and inventory of medicines, including helping to figure out where pharmaceuticals, like malaria treatments, are needed most.

"One to 2 million people worldwide die of malaria each year, and children under 5 are most at risk," Draye says. "During rain season, malaria cases go up, but there's a lack of medicine."

In coming weeks, Draye will return to Ghana during its rainy season to assist health officials on a plan to possibly integrate that system into a scaled-down electronic health record.

Meanwhile, the immunization system replaces paper-work that consumed the time of a half-dozen workers each month. "You can use the PDAs even where there's no electricity,” he says. The handheld devices can be recharged by solar power and data downloaded once the workers get back to offices, he says.

Draye also teaches computer literacy to Ghanaian doctors, nurses, and administrators, and believes technology can usher in massive improvement to health care, there and in the U.S. "IT drives those improvements, providing access to critical information and freeing up more time to focus on patients," he says.

Meanwhile, back at Liberty Pacific, Draye plans to focus his efforts on maximizing workflow and enhancing patient care. Advanced medical imaging can provide doctors with thousands of images to help make a patient diagnosis, Draye says. With that enormous volume of data, technology needs to identify the most critical information, he says. "Technology does the heavy lifting, but it also needs to suggest areas where to put your eyes on."