EthnoMed Home Page

Ellen Howard, K.K. Sherwood Library

Health care professionals in the greater Seattle area, as in many other parts of the country, are seeing increasing numbers of non-English speaking refugees and immigrants. The health care provided to these patients may be less than adequate, since the majority of health providers are not trained in cross-cultural medicine, and must try to bridge language and cultural barriers during brief medical visits.

EthnoMed, an electronic file of original documents relating to the health and culture of refugee groups in the Seattle area, is designed to help health providers deal with the cultural differences between the providers and the target populations. It intends to make pertinent information about culture, language, illness, patient education and community resources quickly accessible to health care professionals.

A team of UW faculty and staff based primarily at Harborview Medical Center began to create this site in 1994 as an extension of Community House Calls, a program focused on bilingual/bicultural case management for high-risk refugee families from East Africa and Southeast Asia. The current EthnoMed team includes one librarian, faculty from General Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, and a law school student, as well as editorial and technical support staff.

All documents written for EthnoMed are reviewed by UW faculty and editors to be sure that they meet university standards for content and quality, although the documents are meant to be useful in a clinical setting and are not designed for cross-cultural studies. Because EthnoMed is intended to be a community voice, the majority of materials on the site are produced in conjunction with community members. EthnoMed assumes that culture is dynamic, and that an electronic medium is ideal for capturing and expressing these changes.

Web-based medical records are being linked to information files so that, for example, a health care provider for a Cambodian patient will be guided to the appropriate section of EthnoMed. As the system now exists, a provider scheduled to see a Cambodian patient with asthma may look up the section about how the concept of asthma is translated, the common cultural and interpretive issues that complicate its management, and (theoretically) print out patient educational materials in Khmer.

While still working at developing the profiles for the Southeast Asian and East African groups, EthnoMed staff is also expanding the site to include legal information related to immigration for health care providers, in depth documents regarding tuberculosis, and patient education materials which are culturally sensitive in a variety of languages. Because of the possibility of handling various fonts and audio on the Web, the latter is a particularly exciting challenge especially in light of the recent cut of state funds to pay for interpreters.

The project's creation and continued growth has been possible, in a large part, because of support from the UW Libraries. The Libraries provided seed money from the Kenneth S. Allen Library Endowment, technical support through the Integrated Advanced Information Management System (IAIMS) and release time for the Harborview librarian. The Opening Doors Initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson and Henry J. Kaiser Foundations, and the Harborview Medical Center have also helped nourish this project.