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12 The Ptolemy Project: Delivering Electronic Health Information in East Africa
Pages 49-54

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From page 49...
... None of us knows how the dissemination of electronic health information will take place in the developing world in ten years time, but a safe guess is that there will be a number of different models, with each adapted to a particular niche, and until we experiment with different models we will not learn what works best where. BioMed Central, the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)
From page 50...
... The World Health Organization devised the Disability Adjusted Life Year to describe the global burden of disease. In this index, injury accounts for 12 percent of the global burden of disease, more than HIV, or diarrhea, malaria, and TB combined.2 There is a global injury pandemic and in 2001 injury killed just over 5 million people around the world yet world attention remains focused mostly on other health issues.
From page 51...
... The Ptolemy Project not only provides access to journals in the University of Toronto Library to the developing world, but it also works to make electronic access to journals from developing countries possible. There is hope for an information exchange that does not flow just from North to South but rather flows South to North and perhaps most importantly of all from South to South.
From page 52...
... "I am very much interested in medical education, especially clinical education. The Ptolemy Project helped me to find relevant information about the subject.
From page 53...
... Where HINARI's strengths are at the institutional level, Ptolemy's are its grassroots connections with a small group of highly influential African surgeons, the way it engages them in the evaluation enterprise, and the way it uses existing university library resources. The purpose of this project is not just to provide information but also to evaluate how it contributes to building the communities of medical curiosity needed in developing countries to solve the health problems that affect billions.
From page 54...
... Ptolemy functions to fortify a fragile emerging research community of African surgeons and we are now engaging them in a Delphi process to identify priorities for surgical development in East Africa. Our participants are, after all, the experts and so we are building the Ptolemy group into an interactive research community focused on finding African solutions to African problems.


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