Maternal Concept Lab

We are very excited to offer a summer fellowship through MCL and Partners In Health. We’re ready to hire ASAP, so send over your resume or CV to me if interested. The job description is below, and feel free to forward widely. This is a great opportunity to apply public health skills to the real-world challenge of using ICTs to improve health in the developing world.

If you are interested in this type of work, but aren’t necessarily the right fit for this opportunity, send your info anyways and your interests, since we are hiring for other short-term positions as well.

Look forward to hearing for you!

Maternal Concept Lab-Partners In Health Fellowship

The Maternal Concept Lab (MCL) is looking for a qualified summer fellow to work with our partner organizations to analyze maternal-child health (MCH) content (e.g. clinical forms, protocols, reports, indicators, etc.), to build a core dataset of MCH terminology and indicators, and to compare to international best practices. The ideal candidate will have a clinical background—preferably OBGYN, midwifery or similar field—with an interest in standards of care and informatics.

This is a paid summer fellowship based in Boston, MA, although applicants based outside of Boston will be considered. Start date is as soon as possible. Send questions and resumes/CVs to info@maternalconceptlab.com.

Project Background

The Maternal Concept Lab (MCL) has partnered with the mHealth Alliance and Partners In Health to work with three Innovation Working Group (IWG) partners—Dimagi Inc., Grameen Foundation and the Rwanda Ministry of Health—to develop standardized terminologies that enable benchmarking and maximize the value of shared knowledge and components across several maternal-child health projects. These projects all utilize mobile health—or mhealth—to improve frontline worker (FLW) effectiveness in parts of Ghana, India and Rwanda and are being funded by IWG to scale regionally or nationally. MCL’s work will support project operations, bolster evaluation, and promote interoperability with national level systems.

About MCL

eHealth standards are important. Clinical best practices even more so. The Maternal Concept Lab is bringing standards and best practices together to make the world’s best maternal-child health content available in open, standards-based formats, leveraging IT and mobile devices where possible.

MCL was launched in 2010 in direct response to the need for standards and common tools to maximize the increased utilization of mHealth platforms to achieve Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5. MCL is (1) developing a standard terminology dictionary for maternal-child health, (2) building open-source tools to make standard terminology easy to use, (3) populating with content from implementers and best practices organizations, and (4) supporting a community of practice around the use of standards within maternal-child health. The dictionary has been adopted by Jembi, Millennium Villages Project, D-tree International, Rwanda Ministry of Health, Partners In Health, and several other organizations. MCL:Search is a web-based tool for searching standard concept dictionaries that is in use in more than 40 countries. MCL partnered with Columbia University International eHealth Laboratory to build a standard interface terminology dictionary for maternal, newborn and child health.