ePAR Dev Notes

Dr. Moses Ndiritu (MBChB, Mphil, CRD) is a clinical epidemiologist with 10 years of clinical practice, 5 years in clinico-epidemiological research and over 3 years of web-based programming. Dr. Ndiritu's interest in programming began way back in 1988 at Starehe Boys Centre where he learnt several programming languages and systems analysis. He grew up in the times when IT was viewed as a "lesser course". Dr. Ndiritu had to choose to join medical school over continuing with a diploma level IT training at his former secondary school as taking one meant forfeiting the other. His intense interest in computing was rekindled during his studies in Epidemiology and Advanced computing at the University of Cambridge in 2001/2002. He quickly grasped the science of epidemiological study design, data analysis and perfected his statistical programming skills in a number of statistical programs. In 2004, he began self-taught studies of python, C++ and PHP but took a break until 2006 when he undertook another self-taught crash course in web programming with PHP. He immediately developed a paediatric clinical information system for use by clinicians at the point of care to aid in the collection of routine health information for his epidemiological work. He soon realised that ICT could be deployed to not only assist in research but to improve clinical service. From that point, his interest in designing and improving eHealth solutions has steadily increased leading to the birth of the ePAR in 2009 when he installed it at Thika Level 5 Hospital for a clinical and microbiological surveillance. Dr. Ndiritu is studying a PhD with Open University UK and considers the development of the ePAR as a major outcome of his PhD in epidemiology. His immediate goal is to finish the PhD, continue to develop ePAR and build outpatient and MHealth modules for the ePAR.