Penn Students Launch Telehealth Program for Refugee Camps

October 22, 2020 - The University of Pennsylvania and Penn Medicine are launching a telehealth program to help refugee camp residents on the other side of the globe.

Penn Sophomores Henry Le and Ananya Dewan have launched the Connected Care Initiative (CCI), a program aimed at using connected health platforms to bring care to vulnerable refuges populations around the world. Their first site is the Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh, the largest in the world and home to members of the Rohingya tribe from neighboring Myanmar.

“Working to improve the access to health care as well as the quality of care delivery is something I’m really passionate about, especially when it comes to these places like Kutupalong,” Dewan told the Daily Pennsylvanian university newspaper.

Working with faculty, the program is recruiting physician volunteers and setting up the telemedicine platform to connect with the refugee camp. It’s now involved in a pilot program to connect a Bangladeshi clinic just outside the camp with specialists at Penn Medicine.

The students are working with Jesse Raiten and Nahreen Ahmed, both doctors and faculty at Penn Medicine, to navigate the complexities of an international telehealth program.

“Anytime you involve other countries, particularly countries that aren’t politically stable or where there is a lot of poverty, a lot of volatility is injected into the situation. That leads to red tape when you’re trying to do a project from abroad,” Raiten pointed out.

Le said the program will expand in the future to other sites around the globe.

“The core goal of our initiative is to find a way to standardize telemedicine for many of the clinics and refugee camps around the world and fill the inadequacies present in each and every refugee camp,” he said.“ I think we’re united by the mission to make health care truly universal.”