IT Consultant, Integrated Care, Health Financing – Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI)

The Clinton Health Access Initiative, Inc. (CHAI) is a global health organization committed to saving lives and reducing the burden of disease in low-and middle-income countries, while strengthening the capabilities of governments and the private sector in those countries to create and sustain high-quality health systems that can succeed without our assistance. For more information, please visit: http://www.clintonhealthaccess.org

CHAI, in partnership with its India affiliate, William J Clinton Foundation (WJCF), works in close partnership with and under the guidance of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) at the Central and States’ levels on an array of high priority initiatives aimed at improving health outcomes. Currently, CHAI supports government partners across projects to expand access to quality care and treatment for HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, tuberculosis, COVID-19, common cancers, sexual and reproductive health, immunization, and essential medicines.

Talent is the fundamental driver of WJCF’s success in helping save lives and reduce the burden of disease. WJCF’s organizational values reflect its relentless endeavour of hiring, nurturing, empowering, and celebrating diverse and high calibre individuals who come together to work as cohesive teams. WJCF places a high premium on providing its staff with an enabling environment that encourages entrepreneurship, humility, respect, equal share of voice and fosters high impact innovation to address some of the most challenging healthcare issues.

Program Overview:

WJCF’s Health Financing program supports governments implementing reforms towards the goal of universal health coverage; ensuring that patients can access the care they need without suffering financial hardship. In India, WJCF staff work closely with the National Health Authority (NHA) and State Health Agencies (SHAs) to improve key scheme outcomes (reduced out-of-pocket expenses, increased utilization, and the reliable delivery of quality care) through a combination of effective data use and analytics for issue identification, capacity building and policy and process change support.

Project Background:

As we continue this support, we are now embarking on an ambitious project to demonstrate a vision of ‘Integrated Care’. This vision consists of two key pillars – helping an individual navigate effectively to appropriate care and monitoring the chain of care to ensure that such care has been delivered. The ambit includes primary care through public facilities and secondary and tertiary care through public and private hospitals (through insurance schemes such as PM-JAY, ESIS, and state schemes as applicable), with minimal or zero out of pocket expense.

The primary purpose of such a demonstration is to establish a model for responsive health care delivery from which insights and lessons can be drawn for wider health systems strengthening. In aspiring to deliver the promise of a single, seamless, coordinated, empathetic and complete response to a health event, both impediments to such care and solutions may be identified. By empowering the beneficiary with the promise of responsiveness, specific weaknesses in current delivery mechanisms (whether in coverage, quality, financial equity, or efficiency) may be pinpointed and quantified. In this manner, the ambition is not only to demonstrate a viable model for integrated care, but to also inform ongoing efforts in health systems strengthening.

Position Summary:

As a part of the project, WJCF is planning to implement a prototype IT system to facilitate the seamless navigation of the healthcare seekers to appropriate care. To this end, WJCF is looking for highly motivated candidates, for the position of IT Consultant, Integrated Care, Health Financing, who could co-ordinate and guide the prototype development and implementation, and also build capacities of the users while maintaining the prototype functioning over a period of six to eight months. The Consultant would also be required to lead the development and implementation of the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for the pilot implementation.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with the program team to understand the system requirements for the Patient Navigation System prototype and document them in form of a software requirements specification (SRS) document.
• Support the program team in assessing the current landscape to identify if any off-the-shelf product can be customized to meet the said requirements.
• Support on-boarding of an IT vendor for the development/ customization of Patient Navigation System prototype, if required.
• Develop a preliminary working version of the Patient Navigation System that the team could utilize till the Patient Navigation System prototype has been developed and is functioning.
• Coordinate thorough testing of the Patient Navigation System prototype.
• Coordinate capacity building of the call centre-based patient navigators (and other users, if any) on using the Patient Navigation System prototype.
• Support in relaying feedback on the Patient Navigation System prototype received from the users to IT vendor to modify/refine the prototype, if required.
• Provide support to the users for the initial three to four months on efficient use of the prototype.
• Manage the database of the prototype and generate insights and reports, as per program team’s requirements.
• Develop a detailed SRS document for the system, based on the learnings from the prototype.
• Ensure integration of the M&E framework into the Patient Navigation System prototype to track the process-indicators for pilot project implementation.
• Submit monthly progress reports to the program manager.
• Provide any other support, as required by the program team.

Key deliverables:

Following are the key deliverables expected from the IT Consultant:

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science/ information technology/ electronics and communications or other related fields.
• At least 5 years of software development, IT product/ program management or IT consultancy experience.
• Experience of engaging with governments at national and state levels would be desirable.
• Knowledge about the India’s public health systems would be desirable.
• Demonstrated experience of developing software requirements specifications and translating user requirements for the product development team is a must.
• Experience in designing and managing monitoring and evaluation systems.
• Excellent analytical (qualitative and quantitative) skills and communication (written and verbal) skills.
• Ability to think strategically, handle ambiguity, and problem solve in a fast-paced, limited-structure, multicultural environment.
• Willingness to travel to states at short notice (~20% travel).
• Comfortable working collaboratively with multiple stakeholders, with humility and a learning mindset.

Skills & Traits:

• Well versed with MS Office.
• Software development and database management.