Tech firms cash in as healthcare sector gains from cloud computing
A patient is screened for diabetes at the Nyeri Provincial General Hospital. The public health sector is looking to IT to secure tonnes of patient information that is still on paper. Photo/JOSEPH KANYI
What you need to know:
The choice to partner with public facilities is well guided. Nobody has more data than the government. Anyone having the first bite of this cherry is likely to take a big one and thus curve a larger market share for themselves.
A future where public health facilities will dump the manual registers and doctors go to work armed only with a smartphone and a stethoscope is not far off.
Several rural areas for the first time ever received cell phone signals this week including remote areas such as Tsavo West where we are running a health programme.
These are areas previously dimmed as not being economically viable for the setting up of masts due to low Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) as the technical people put it. I was therefore surprised to see a mast erected by a leading mobile operator near one of the health facilities we serve.
According to sources in the industry, the development comes after one of the mobile providers pledged to use technology to help accelerate efforts to tackle Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 4 and 5. The main target is improving access and quality of maternal and child health services.
It is hoped that IT will turn the tide by overcoming challenges met in past attempts. For instance, accessing healthcare in rural communication is key in tracing immunisation and ante-natal clinic defaulters.
Service providers use technology to remind and encourage pregnant women about hygiene and how, when and where to get in touch with health workers in such areas given their vastness and erratic health services.
The ongoing project will be piloted in areas with poor MDG statistics. In addition to the network system, the mobile operator has also thrown in some mobile phones and technical support in data handling with a possibility of storing it in the cloud.
In a struggling industry faced with dwindling traditional voice revenue streams, data, it appears, is going to be the next frontier. Information content is critical and this may be a foresight the operator has. You should either be creating it, storing it or sharing it if you hope to benefit from the data ecosystem.
The choice to partner with public facilities is well guided. Nobody has more data than the government. Every single day the facilities create data and will continue doing so unlike businesses that may go bust.
While the project particularly aims at meeting the MDGs, I am sure the operator’s accounts people are cranking up numbers and have set a date for recouping their costs.
Here are the statistics. There are about 8,000 public health facilities. The data generated daily is incredibly high given the duplicity of reports generated and the many users of these facilities.
Unlike private facilities all public ones must generate records and store or share them with the national offices. From the lowest level all the way up an organogram six- structure deep, it creates an ever multiplying pool of users. Anyone having the first bite of this cherry is likely to take a big one and thus curve a larger market share for themselves.
It is not pure coincidence that the same operator has another health project involving a doctors’ call centre. Their accurate analysis is that people are willing to pay for health information more than for other types of data. The anonymity and privacy of telephones and virtual consultations help patients to address potentially embarrassing issues. But it is not just data that they are keen on, their cloud based storage service is meant to sync their other products into a one suite. Integration of their mobile money into hospital fees payment will add to their dominance of the tech scene in a “Googlesque” fashion.
Initiatives like these offer hope for those of us advocating for eHealth and mHealth for rural healthcare reforms.
A future where public health facilities will dump the manual registers and doctors go to work armed only with a smartphone and a stethoscope is not far off.
