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Effectiveness of Mobile Healthcare
The healthcare sector is one of the areas most impacted by the increasing prevalence of technology, specifically mobile penetration, with mobile healthcare solutions helping to fight diseases and promote healthy lifestyles. Continent-wide growth is creating an incentive for both private and public players to monitor and develop context-specific solutions. The rise of the African middle class, increased investment in the healthcare sector, positive externalities from rising mobile penetration across the continent, growth of local manufacturers and growing support from governments are all helping to facilitate digital health innovation.
There is a strong role for mobile devices in improving access to healthcare across the continent. However, to ensure that this capacity is fully tapped, more should be done at both the solution and policy level. At the solution level, it’s important to ensure that solutions are sustainable. They should be designed with a strong focus on the experience of end users, including ensuring that they are able to adapt to the context of the various African countries where they’ll be used. Solutions should be designed with a long view that aims for scale, integration into the health system and seamless interoperability across various devices. Metrics should be used to assess effectiveness and outcomes, and to allow for data-driven learning. It’s also important to constantly update products to incorporate feedback from end users across the ecosystem including health workers, administrators and patients.
SMS for Africa
Smartphones and access to broadband internet connection are potent tools for innovation, and due to the undersea internet cables encircling Africa, the continent gets more and more connected. Mobile phone solutions popped up for almost everything ranging from the iCow app to help farmers get advice until one of the biggest long-term experiments with universal basic income. More than 21 thousand people in Kenya receive 2,250 Kenyan shillings, one-quarter to half of the average salary in Bomet County, one of the poorest in Kenya, every month for the next 12 years. It’s courtesy of the US-based charity GiveDirectly, which is studying the effects of handing people lumps of cash with no strings attached.
Regarding healthcare, mobile phones and smartphone apps mean basic access to care and better management of scarce resources. Around 27,000 government health workers in Uganda use a mobile health system called mTRAC to report on medicine stocks across the country. Novartis is also working on an mHealth pilot in Nairobi and Mombasa to understand the supply chain cycle better and build capabilities to ensure medicines reach patients in need. Through this initiative, pharmacists register their patients for surveys via SMS. The survey results then help map out where patients are located to redistribute medicines to areas in need. Mobile healthcare solutions such as Kenya’s Miti Health and Ghana’s mPedigree are helping to improve the drug supply chain by validating prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs.
Smartphones could also aid diagnostics. Nigerian start-up, Ubenwa has developed an A.I. algorithm able to diagnose childbirth asphyxia based on an infant’s cry. The smartphone application analyses the amplitude and frequency patterns of the cry and provides an instant diagnosis. As, according to WHO, birth asphyxia is the third highest cause of under-five child deaths and is responsible for almost one million neonatal deaths annually, the solution comes as a real life-saver.
The Medical Futurist - 5 June 2018
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