Operation Fistula is a global nonprofit, partnering with grassroots organizations to fund and coordinate fistula treatment for women and girls with the least access to surgical services. With a small program team stretched across a growing footprint, Operation Fistula worked with Vera to build two Claude skills that streamline surgery data review, surgeon follow-up, and program data queries, all within a HIPAA-compliant environment.
Operation Fistula funds and coordinates fistula surgeries performed by local surgeons across 22 countries, tracking outcomes through CommCare, Airtable, and Google Sheets. The organization works to raise awareness of obstetric fistula, a treatable childbirth injury that remains widely misunderstood, and to ensure women and girls affected by it have access to surgical care and support.
As Operation Fistula scaled across countries and expanded its scope of services, the operational load on its small program team grew. Reviewing surgery records for data quality issues, drafting follow-up emails to surgeons in multiple languages, and running ad hoc queries across systems were all high-volume, repetitive tasks that pulled program officers away from deeper analysis and implementing program improvements.
The organization had informally explored AI tools but had no structured approach, governance framework, or clear view of where AI could add the most value. As a global health organization handling sensitive patient data, any solution also had to meet HIPAA compliance requirements.
Vera led the engagement across four phases: 1) discovery, 2) design, 3) build, and 4) enablement. The team scoped and prioritized use cases from more than 20 initial ideas, assessing each against both technical feasibility and ethical fit, including a recommendation against a facial recognition approach to duplicate-record detection due to bias risk for the populations Operation Fistula serves.
The Enterprise edition of Claude for Nonprofits met the HIPAA compliance requirement. Vera configured Claude’s native connectors for Airtable, Google Sheets, and Gmail to Operation Fistula’s existing schema and workflows, keeping data within current systems rather than introducing new infrastructure.
Working tools were in place within five weeks of the project kickoff. The surgery QA and surgeon email workflow has turned a high-volume, manual, record-by-record process into a structured, session-based review, with multilingual emails now generated directly from a QA flag rather than individually drafted. Program data that once required a manual export or the most technical team member on hand can now be queried in plain language in seconds.
Operation Fistula also gained a governance foundation, including a usage policy and documentation built for two audiences: end users and AI administrators. The team plans to independently build on this foundation in the near term, starting with monthly surgeon performance nudges and newsletter drafting, and is further exploring a future data layer with MotherDuck to bring CommCare, Airtable, QuickBooks, and Google Drive data together for deeper analysis.
“There are levers to control everything… so many levers that you need somebody to help you guide you through that process”
– Seth Cochran, Founder & CEO, Operation Fistula
“It’s amazing to do things like get my program manager’s totals for the first six months of the year, and then be able to use that human-generated, human-validated number to test Claude and to test whether it’s accurately pulling numbers. And I can tell you that it has been [accurate].”
– Helen Davies, COO, Operation Fistula