How can the inclusion of new digital ways of working in the healthcare sector enhance outcomes for patients to improve equity in global health in the COVID-19 era and beyond?
These were the questions tackled by a panel of globally recognized health tech experts in a recent webinar for the African healthcare community.
BroadReach Group CEO Chris LeGrand, Hosted the webinar. He is an internationally recognized leader in public health management. The webinar was joined by panelists Dr. John Sargent, the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and other leaders in the health care industry across Africa and the Middle East.
LeGrand said “Technology can really make transformational progress and get us back on track to reach the Universal Health Coverage goals by 2030.”
Five Key Insights Were Shared On Improving Health Equity Through Technology:
Reactive Healthcare Wastes Precious Resources
Dr. Sargent said “Healthcare is often reactive. Patients arrive when they are already very sick. These patients are more complex to take care of and therefore more resource intensive.”
This mostly happens in settings where resources are already precious and scarce. In such cases, health professionals base their decisions on gut feel rather than the data at hand. This makes hospital administrators spend more money and time on operations, data, and I.T to solve the situation which is always not a fruitful exercise. Prevention and proactivity are the keys.
It is important to know your community and using social determinants of health data smartly can assist health systems in tackling situations before they escalate.
Dashboards Are Useless To Healthcare Implementers
Dr. Sargent posed this question:“Despite everything the industry is investing in and spending on IT, are we really moving the dial to improve health outcomes?
Can we improve health outcomes by investing in more data and analytics? Not necessarily.”
Healthcare managers who oversee complex settings often invest intensively in data, analytics, and dashboards, but these tactics “mean nothing unless they are a means to an end, and not the end itself.”
That means if dashboards present a lot of data without delivering critical practical workflows and advice, then it is not valuable. It must provide implementers of healthcare with highly relevant, easy-to-digest, targeted insights to drive their activities and provide oversight coordination of the whole system.
Data Analytics Are Irrelevant To Most Healthcare Workers
More health data does not guarantee better insights, and using more analytics to interpreted data does not help health workers because the data analyzed does not benefit them and the immediate tasks at hand.
“For the executive, operational manager or frontline health worker, if you can deliver them critical advice on workflows and help them collaborate with their colleagues in real-time, then yes data can help them.
But if your answer is, let’s deliver a bunch of dashboards, and let’s train a nurse, who has 200 acute patients queuing outside the door, to be a data scientist, to click on this button and filter that, then no, more data will not move the dial on outcomes.”
The main idea here is that, rolling out pure dashboards hasn’t brought any result for healthcare operators in the United States, Asia, Africa, and Europe. It only works for those whose job is to analyses data, not for healthcare implements at the moment.
What really makes the difference to health care workers’ needs is where technology is used to tell staff in plain English or natural language what to do each day through simple instructions connecting their workflows with their colleagues, supporting them to offer better care in every practical way.
The Vantage platform, for instance, does this through an integration with Microsoft Teams.
Greater Patient Engagement Demands Greater Mass Personalization
Patients’ expectations from healthcare workers are changing as they were more active participants in their own health. The world has become more digitized since the past year specifically, making patients become used to various industries which offer them personalized digitized customer services, which they are now expecting from the healthcare sector as well.
Achieving meaningful personalization of customer care at scale meant that better insights needed to be leveraged, and this was only possible if various partners across the health and health-tech ecosystems collaborated to improve patient experiences.
This included public-private partnerships and collaborations between large players such as Microsoft and smaller agile partners like Vantage Health Technologies and other innovators around the world whose collective mission is to improve universal health equity.
To attain meaningful personalization of customer care, better insight is needed which can only be possible if partners across the health and health tech systems collaborate to enhance the experience of patients.
Reaching The “Last Mile” Of Patients Requires Greater Innovation
Dr. Kambugu said, from personal experience as a medical doctor who has worked with HIV clients and saw around 400 patients a day, as a health executive and seasoned researcher, it was a huge challenge to run operations on a paper-based system, however, it wasn’t to transition to digitization between 2005 and 2012.
It is this insight that drives Dr. Kambugu and Uganda’s Infectious Diseases Institute in their research and efforts to innovate and trial new ideas to improve patient and health outcomes, from drone technology to deliver medications and transforming patient experience through voice prompt advice lines to using digital tools to enhance patient-physician interactions.
What he learned from the experience was that in order to reach the “last mile” of patients, “it was necessary to work smarter and with more innovation to achieve impact and cost-effectiveness”.
The only effective way to manage pandemics or achieving the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets is to digitize, gain access to quality data, and then translate data to very practical workflows.
These targets entail 95% of people living with HIV knowing their HIV status, 95% of people who know their status receiving treatment, and 95% of people on HIV treatment becoming virally suppressed.
To watch the webinar online, click this link