Student Programs

How has the Global Health Innovation Lab impacted your student experience?
I considered myself a student relatively distant from the standard scale, at least compared to most of my peers, due to the fact of me being more eager to participate in activities other than only studying. However, I was still too afraid of approaching ideas where I didn’t have enough control before the Global Health Innovation Lab (GHIL) experience. Due to the fact of being in a different language from my mother tongue, I was really worried about being judged or not being able to achieve the expectation we would face.

Although not having a lot of difficulties with the English language, due to having been enrolled by my parents in language courses from a young age, I would never imagine an opportunity like this to put my knowledge to test. At first I was shocked to have been selected to participate and really excited to work with everyone, but the fear factor was also there to pull me down.

However, throughout the experience, with the assistance of the professors and my group peers, I was beginning to feel more confident to express myself and be less afraid of making mistakes. The experience sort of gave me some peace of mind that as a human being I’m not supposed to be right all the time. Also, through the GHIL experience, I could expand my horizons due to all the different backgrounds from everyone we met.

This experience also made me look inwards upon myself and see some traits I could work on improving. So, to summarize, I guess that this experience made me a better version of myself, someone braver, eager to work on achieving my goals, a humbler person, someone that may count on others instead of doing everything on my on, and also was an opportunity of making connections that greatly added to my perspective of the world, and not to see my path as something black and white.

In what (concrete/measurable) ways do you hope that the projects will impact HELP/HVisao?
There are three main ideas that we want to develop during this semester. The first one is focused on developing a software to manage the patients calls and messages. Knowing that, it could be a chatbot or something like that to automate this task, we are looking for something more feasible, not only for our reality, but something that can be done by the deadline. Also, there will be the development of a brochure to approach the patients before the surgeries, giving them a guide of what must be done before and after the surgery in order to have the most of it without problems. This brochure is the first draft of what can be done, because there may be changes on the idea to make it more appealing to the public.

The second idea involves a layout shift on the patients exam results. Our main stakeholder involves all of Unifacisa’s healthcare system. However, to achieve that, we need to work with their exam supplier, a company named Pró-Sangue. We are in contact with them in order to start to implement our prototype ideas, to further begin the testing with the control group and see if the idea can really impact people's lives.

As for the third idea, it will only be implemented if there is time on the schedule to do so. It consists of building a website or an app to ease the patients communication with HELP, because through the app, the patients would be able to contact the employees, in a similar way to the first idea and access their exam results. These are the first and more crucial ideas the group has discussed until the moment, but it is envisioned to be a platform to better address the patients needs about setting appointments and all the other resources they need from the hospital.

So, the impact of these ideas, each in your own way, is giving people a better experience on their healthcare procedures. That can be achieved by allowing them to have a better comprehension of what is going on, to be more active on their appointments by understanding better what their exam results mean, to have an easier way of contacting the health care services and accessing their exam results. Having access to more information to better assist them throughout the surgery processes. And as a cycle, the moire people helped, may lead to more people seeking Unifacisa’s Healthcare system, which will lead to more data to improve even more the ideas, what will result in a better service for the population.