5 insights into using Health-Tech to achieve health equity in Africa

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Saturday, August 7, 2021 / 12:00 / BroadReach / Header Image Credit: Medically Home

Insights from the webinar hosted by BroadReach Group CEO Chris LeGrand, with Dr John Sargent, Dr Andrew Kambugu and Rochelle Mountany as speakers.

How can new digital ways of working in healthcare improve outcomes for patients to increase global health equity in the COVID-19 era and beyond? These were the questions addressed by a group of globally recognized health technology experts in a recent webinar for the African health community.

Hosted by BroadReach Group CEO Chris LeGrand, an internationally recognized leader in public health management, the webinar was joined by speakers Dr John Sargent, World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2015, health technology innovator and co-founder of BroadReach, Dr Andrew Kambugu, executive director of the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University in Uganda; and Rochelle Mountany, senior manager and health care consultant at Microsoft for Southern Africa and the Middle East.

“Technology can truly make transformative progress and get us back on track to achieve universal health coverage goals by 2030,” said LeGrand, who runs BroadReach Group, a global social impact company that leverages health technology and innovation to improve universal access to quality health care through large-scale health programs in Africa and the United States.

Some quick facts about global health inequality:

1. In high-income countries, life expectancy can be around 80 years, while in low-income countries it can be around 59. (UN)

2. Available data indicates that only about 16% of South Africans were enrolled in medical assistance programs in 2018, with only 10% of Africans joining such schemes compared to 73% of whites. This has had a severe impact on access to quality health care along racial lines. (Study)

3. Before the pandemic, girls in Lesotho were estimated to live 42 years less than those in Japan, and in Sweden, the risk of a woman dying during pregnancy and childbirth was 1 in 17 400, while in Afghanistan, the odds were 1 in 8. (WHO)

4. High-income countries (19% of the world’s adult population) purchased more than half (54% / 4.6 billion) of the global vaccine doses as of March 2021. Of the remaining doses, 33% were purchased from LMIC (81% of the world adult population) and 13% were purchased from COVAX. (Source)

5. As of May 2021, only 0.3% of the total vaccines administered globally were destined for low-income countries. (WHO)

6. As of March, on average, 1 in 4 people in high-income countries had received a coronavirus vaccine, compared to only 1 in more than 500 in low-income countries. (WHO)

Five key insights were shared on improving health equity through technology:

1. Reactive healthcare wastes valuable resources

“Healthcare is often reactive,” says Dr. Sargent. “Patients arrive when they are already very ill. These patients are more complex to care for and therefore more costly in terms of resources.” This often happens in contexts where resources are already particularly precious and scarce. Healthcare professionals who are responsive usually base their decisions on instinct rather than on the data at hand. This leads hospital administrators to spend far more time and money on operations, IT and data to manage the situation, which isn’t always a fruitful exercise. Proactivity and prevention are essential. Knowing your community – and the intelligent use of the social determinants of health data – can help health systems break the curve so that targeted health campaigns can be instituted before a situation escalates, says Dr. Sargent.

2. Dashboards are useless for healthcare implementers

Dr Sargent asked this question: “Despite everything the industry is investing and spending on IT, are we really turning the knob to improve health outcomes? Can we improve health outcomes by investing in more data and analytics. ? Not necessarily”. Healthcare managers overseeing complex settings often invest heavily in data, analytics and dashboards, but these tactics “mean nothing unless they are a means to an end, not the end itself.” This means that if dashboards only present a lot of data but can’t provide practical advice and critical workflows, it means nothing, says Sargent. It must provide health implementers with easy-to-digest, highly relevant and targeted information to guide their action and offer coordination of supervision throughout the system.

3. Data analysis is irrelevant to most healthcare professionals

More health data doesn’t mean better insights, and more analytics to interpret more data don’t help most healthcare professionals because data analysis is irrelevant to them and the immediate tasks at hand, says Sargent. “For the executive, operations manager, or frontline healthcare worker, if you can provide them with critical workflow advice and help them collaborate with their colleagues in real time, then yes, data can help them. But if your answer is, let’s give a bunch of dashboards and train a nurse, who has 200 acute patients queuing outside the door, to become a data scientist, to click this button and filter that, so no, more data doesn’t they will shift the dial to the results. ”

The bottom line is that launching purer dashboards simply hasn’t shifted the results for healthcare professionals to Africa, Asia, Europe, or the United States. It only works for super users whose job it is to analyze data, not for field health implementers at the moment, he says. However, what really makes a difference at the forefront is where technology is used to tell healthcare professionals in plain English (or natural language) what to do each day via simple instructions – connecting their workflows with their colleagues – allowing them to provide better care in a very practical way. The Vantage platform, for example, does this through an integration with Microsoft Teams.

4. Greater patient involvement requires greater mass personalization.

Patients were becoming more active participants in their own health, but that also meant that their expectations of healthcare professionals were changing, Mountany says. With the rapid digitalization of the world, particularly in the past year, patients had become accustomed to various industries providing them with personalized digital customer service and now requiring it from the healthcare sector as well. Achieving meaningful personalization of customer care at scale meant that better information needed to be leveraged, and this was only possible if various partners in healthcare and technology ecosystems collaborated to improve patient experiences. This included public-private partnerships and collaborations between big players like Microsoft and smaller agile partners like Vantage Health Technologies and other innovators around the world whose collective mission is to improve universal health equity.

5. Reaching the “last mile” for patients requires more innovation

Speaking from personal experience in the field as a physician who spent a lot of time working on a busy HIV client where he saw up to 400 patients a day and as an experienced researcher and healthcare executive, Dr. Kambugu said it was a monumental challenge to perform. operations on a paper system, but also the first journey towards digitization between 2005 and 2012 was not easy. What he learned from experience is that to reach the “last mile” of patients, “it was necessary to work smarter and with more innovation to achieve impact and cost effectiveness.” Digitizing, accessing quality data and then translating that data into very practical workflows and next steps for the clinic staff was the only effective way to manage pandemics or achieve the 95-95-95 goals. by UNAIDS. These goals imply that 95% of people living with HIV know their HIV status, 95% of people who know their status receive treatment, and 95% of people being treated for HIV go viral. deleted.

It is this insight that drives Dr. Kambugu and the Infectious Diseases Institute of Uganda in their research and efforts to innovate and experiment with new ideas for improving patient and health outcomes, from drone technology to delivering drugs and transforming the world. patient experience through vocal counseling lines to the use of digital tools to improve doctor-patient interactions.

The webinar can be viewed online at this link here

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