Julius is a Ghanaian psychiatrist based in the UK and a part-time PhD (Health Informatics) student at the Yorkshire Centre for Health Informatics (YCHI), University of Leeds. His PhD project is looking at the challenges and opportunities in using mobile computing platforms for community mental health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa focusing on Ghana. This project invloves customising OpenMRS and using the OpenMRS/Open-Data-Kit platform for mobile telepsychiatry. This is an attempt to help alleviate the effects of the 'brain-drain' of doctors and nurses from Ghana to the developed countries thus leaving a total of FOUR (Yes, you heard me right,FOUR!) psychiatrists to care for an estimated 1m mental health cases in a population of 24m Ghanaians. (This BBC report summarises the scale of the problem:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8040057.stm) The project is being piloted in a deprived rural district of Ghana.
Julius is also the Founder/President of the newly-formed West African Health Informatics Fellowship Program (http://www.wahifp.org). The aim of WAHIFP is to embark of capacity-building in health informatics in West Africa to enhance progress towards the achievement of the MDGs.
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