RDVP Seminar: Interplast (4/25/2005)

Susan Hayes, CEO, and Bill Schneider, Chief Medical Officer of Interplast, came to share the work this organization is doing to eliminate the hardship of living with conditions that can be treated through reconstructive plastic surgery. Cleft lip and cleft palate were two of the most common mentioned, but burn scar contractures (where tissue heals from a burn in such a way that the range of motion is limited) is another significant area, and doctors perform the full range of operations for their specialty. These volunteers treat about 3,500 patients per year. The patients are charged nothing.

Volunteer teams of about a dozen people (2 surgeons, 2 anesthesiologists, 4 nurses, 2 translators, 2 pediatricians) travel for a two-week period where they
might treat 20 patients per day. Other programs are "visiting educators" where a doctor makes a one-week visit to one location, covering a single topic. The volunteers are mostly, though not exclusively, Americans. Interplast also runs 7 outreach centers for training. Patients are taken for surgery only if they meet basic health requirements (since their conditions are not life-threatening, they must be in otherwise good health before a surgeon would operate). The Patient Care Improvement Program (PCIP) is designed to look for other ways to improve patient health, like providing iron supplements.

Interplast also focused on the contribution that IT could make--tracking statistics of patient data and enabling virtual collaboration among globally distributed colleagues. They maintain a blog. Their intranet site allows doctors to upload pictures and case histories of particularly challenging cases. But they were not hung up on technology: Dr. Schneider commented that through their expansion plans they have found it is the "individual that matters; a human being that is committed to making the program work locally." He cited the scarcity of plastic surgeons in other countries: with Zambia and Bangladesh each having 1 per 10 million people.