Tele-dermatology at PMH!

This was the first day for a new dermatology resident – Jeremy. He’s from Stanford, and is going to work with a derm attending from HUP (Carrie), who is supposed to arrive over the weekend. It’s pretty interesting – they are actually going to set up a tele-derm system. She did her training at Baylor, and so has already set up a few other African hospitals that have Baylor pediatrics up with this tele-derm system. Basically, you take pictures, email them and a clinical history to a pediatrician in the states (usually her) and after a few days, you get a probable diagnosis. I’m sure some of you are wondering why dermatology is at all needed in Africa… There’s actually quite a few dermatology cases related to the diseases you see here, like HIV, TB, Cryptococcus, all sorts of parasites, etc. Often a patient hasn’t been diagnosed with something yet, but the dermatology (along with a biopsy of a dermatological lesion) can provide the diagnosis less invasively than a biopsy somewhere else. So hopefully this will work out. Other than this tele-derm system, Carrie is hoping to be here about 6-8 weeks a year, and trying to get a senior dermatology resident out at Princess Marina 6 months out of the year.

Nothing else really happened today – got off work at around 5:30 and went to Riverwalk with Amy, one of the new Penn residents that arrived last weekend. The other one is named Joanne (Mazzarelli). We bought Amy a phone, and went to Pick N Pay where we spent P510!!! But we were cooking dinner for everyone that night, including the on call people. I directed everyone – I was the head chef. :) We made enchiladas, which were ok – I don’t have quite the right ingredients here. But I think everyone was satisfied. I made both chicken and eggplant enchiladas because we have so many vegetarians here.