Washington Global Health Alliance Discovery Series Presents:
“mHealth and Global HIV/AIDS Control: What Works And Where Is It Going?”
Richard Lester, MD, FRCPC Assistant Clinical Professor Division of Infectious Diseases University of British Columbia
Details on the WGHA Discovery Series lecture are as follows:
Location: Bioengineering Building (Foege North), Room N130, University of Washington, 3720 15th Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98195 Time: Tuesday, January 31, 3:30-4:30 p.m. Reception: Vista Court Café, in Foege Building South, 4:30-5:30 p.m
Biography Dr. Richard Lester is an assistant clinical professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of British Columbia and the Medical Head of STI/HIV control at the BC Centre for Disease Control in Vancouver, Canada. He founded of WelTel while living for five years in Kenya doing his HIV research fellowship with the University of Manitoba and University of Nairobi. While there, he was the principal investigator of WelTel Kenya1, a randomized clinical trial among HIV/AIDS patients in Kenya that provided some of the first evidence that using mobile phones and text messaging via SMS to support patient care could significantly improve health outcomes in resource-limited settings. These findings, published in the Lancet in 2010, have been widely discussed in global media such as The Economist and Nature magazines, and he has presented his work at the World Health Organization’s meeting on Retention in HIV Care and at the US Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator. He is currently working to advance health outcome evidence for mobile health (mHealth) in multiple global settings and to scale-up WelTel as a service in Africa.
For information about the WGHA Discovery Series, contact Ashlee Choi at ashleech@uw.edu or 206.685.7362.
