Providence eases the way for patients and medical teams overseas through telehealth partnership
Sara Jo Grethlein, M.D. chief medical officer for the Providence Swedish Clinical Institutes, was very familiar with Kenya before she joined Providence Swedish in 2021. Indiana University School of Medicine, where she previously worked, has a partnership with a medical school in Kenya. And Dr. Grethlein had visited the country several times on vacation.
“Keyna is a spectacularly beautiful country but with overwhelming poverty,” said Dr. Grethlein, an oncologist by training.
When Providence began a partnership with World Telehealth Initiative (“WTI”) to offer virtual care and medical training to facilities in Kenya, Grethlein quickly signed up.
“I was encouraged by the quality of the medical trainees I interacted with,” she said. “They were very bright and committed, despite an absolute lack of resources. It’s remarkable that they’ve been able to learn as much as they have and be as good as they are in the conditions they work in.”
Dr. Grethlein is one of 147 caregivers across the Providence family of organizations that have volunteered their time with WTI to see overseas patients online, while assisting and educating the on-site medical staff taking care of the patient. Seventy of those caregivers began volunteering in 2024, following a recruitment campaign.
WTI matches our caregivers with teams in underserved areas needing assistance. Specialties range from pediatrics to kidney, heart and cancer care.
For two and a half years, Dr. Grethlein would volunteer for an hour a month seeing patients virtually and upskilling the clinical teams at the hospital in Longisa, in rural Kenya.
Her experiences inspired her and reminded her the vast differences between Africa and the U.S.
“We had to make difficult choices at times,” she said. “Do I transfer a patient to a hospital that has endoscopy, the ability to look with a camera into the patient’s GI tract? Or to a hospital that has a CT scanner? The doctors at Longisa don’t have access to a hospital with both. Living with the abundance that we have here, you have to rethink medicine in that context. It was really a powerful experience.”
Providence has partnered with WTI since 2021 to assist medical teams overseas. The partnership began with teams in Nigeria, with Kenya, Ethiopia and Togo being added next. In 2024, caregivers started volunteering with WTI to serve teams in Bhutan.
“Our partnerships usually start with a few specialties, based on what the in-country team needs when they reach out to us,” said Sharon Allen, CEO of WTI. “They’ll say their needs are everything, but they don’t fully understand what they need. For example, they might say they need a pediatrician, but in reality they have a very sick baby so could use a neonatologist consult, but they don’t even know what that is.”
Allen said the partnerships grow as the two sides converse and the needs become clearer.
“Providence played a key role in this: Their clinicians introduced the concept of quarterly reflection meetings where the participants could come together and share what’s been happening and what they’ve seen,” Allen said. “We’ve learned from those meetings how we can better support our in-country partners, so then we can reach out to the correct providers on this end with those needs.”
Dr. Grethlein has stepped back from working with the team in Longisa, but she is considering a shift to volunteering through WTI with a team in Bhutan in Southeast Asia. In addition, she has recruited her fellow oncologists to volunteer their time with the Longisa team, and two of them have completed the enrollment process.
“Focusing on the basics of caring for another human being and creating a system that can provide the best possible care with the resources available, that’s what connects doctors between Kenya and Seattle, and all around the world,” she said. “Anything I can do to help them, I’m happy to do because when everything else is stripped away, that’s what being a doctor is.”
