How technology companies can usher in new era in health sector

Increasing technology use in healthcare will increase service delivery. Photo/FILE 

In Summary

• In the long-term technology manufacturers and industries that feed off such developments and innovations need to realise this. The healthcare ecosystem is big enough to feed all.

A couple of days ago I attended a national work group meeting on m-health and e-health. The gathering spearheaded by the national government’s Division of Family Health brings together interested players in healthcare to chart a way forward on developing, supporting and running a national and unified m-health and e-health system.

For those of us interested in how technology and healthcare can merge this was a good gathering. In a previous article I had indicated some of the challenges public health workers especially in rural areas face.

Operating in resource limited setups with heavy reliance in cumbersome and manual health records means that unnecessary efforts and time is spent on this process. This against a background of understaffing is one of the challenges facing our healthcare data systems.

Several similar initiatives have been running apart, duplicating work and expending resources unnecessarily.

Fortunately, the government is now keen to unify such efforts. The various stakeholders have an opportunity of not just building ‘workable solutions’ but having broader memberships to give it a stronger team. Sadly, however, as with many other previous attempts the input from business side was minimal.

Why should businesses that feed on technology support such?

In the long-term technology manufacturers and industries that feed off such developments and innovations need to realise this. The healthcare ecosystem is big enough to feed all.

Just a statistic to give insight on potential business opportunities: the Ministry of Health has about 8,000 or so units. Each of these facilities is staffed with three or five personnel and in some cases more. In addition, health facilities have about 20 or so reporting tools that are used for monitoring and evaluation of programme outcomes.

If you include accounting and human resource data for each facility the opportunity increases.

All these present an opportunity for many players to partner and gain from such initiatives. Manufacturers of mobile devices, data storage servers, developers are just but a few of those who stand to gain.

Of course challenges do exist because while efforts towards realising an e-health and m-health are ongoing, there is no infrastructure.

Existing businesses, for example, those that supply the tonnes and tonnes of papers and printers will not cede the business ground easily. On a positive note, however, the government has shown it is willing to migrate to the digital era.

This also presents an opportunity for the infrastructure investors to come on board with solutions. What comes in mind especially for remote units where most health facilities are off grid is leveraging on solar, cloud computing, and mobile devices to reach that last mile and deliver the technology.

A key entry point for the businesses would be facilitating the various developers’ workgroups.