Answer to health care access lies in technology

The mobile phone, Africa’s most important digital technology, is boosting African health as it emerges as a platform for diagnosis and treatment.

Fifteen years ago, few Africans had a phone; today, about three-quarters do. Mobile phones also give Africans the chance to engineer their own solutions.

According to African Development Bank, in the recent years, most countries in Africa have doubled or tripled their international bandwidth capacity and some have even seen a 10-fold increase.

Advancement in information technology has been hailed as an important catalyst in addressing some of the biting challenges in the region.

Poverty is widespread; its population is forecast to double by 2050; its burden of disease, especially non-communicable ones is rising; its healthcare workforce is small and many countries have been plagued by recurrent civil unrest with resultant damage to infrastructure.

Thirty-one sub-Saharan African countries have 10 or less medical doctors per 100,000 people. There are countries without specialists in some fields and many medical schools have no specialists in subspecialties, limiting capacity development.

This month, between June 22 and 26, Kenya will be hosting key decision-makers and stakeholders in Naivasha from around the world to discuss the challenges of implementing electronic health or e-health programmes across Africa and the world.

Many innovations in technology have shown that, if used effectively and efficiently, e-health can be used to provide quality data for decision making, improve service quality and reduce the cost of healthcare delivery by reducing redundancy and duplication and introducing economies of scale.

Defined as the use of Information Communications Technology, locally and at a distance, to strengthen health systems and address public health priorities, e-health has the potential to increase the efficiency of health systems and to improve access, especially in remote areas, for marginalised or excluded populations, people with disabilities and the elderly.

FACILITATE DECISION MAKING

E-health innovations can improve access to reliable and accurate data at all levels to facilitate decision-making processes. These innovations can also empower the health workforce and reduce the human resources for health shortage in Africa by providing training to health staff, thus increasing the number of trained personnel and improving the quality of training of existing staff at a limited cost. As such, it requires a different and radical way of thinking about the delivery of health services.

In rural Africa for example, a trip to a doctor could take days. If you need to see a specialist, this means a referral, another long journey and probably a lengthy wait.

But with internet access or by use of a mobile phone and a software application, one can reach a health provider from their home and get some help before starting the long journey, thereby saving time and money or even a life.

It is for this and many other reasons that experts have hailed e-health as possibly the most important revolution in healthcare since the advent of modern medicine.

At a time when very few African countries have an e-health policy, strategy or roadmap, the upcoming e-health conference in Kenya will be an important milestone in building consensus for action to improve health systems particularly in Africa.

There are, however, barriers to the successful implementation of e-health strategies which have proven difficult to overcome. For example, it has not always been easy to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of patients because of concerns about the protection of personal privacy when their personal health information is available and accessible through digital devices.

These types of issues cannot be ignored; they must be overcome to the satisfaction of all before e-health will be able to fulfil any promises to deliver greater health efficiencies.

Wambugu is a monitoring and evaluation specialist; [email protected]