Use digital apps to achieve health goals

Universal Healthcare, or UHC as is commonly known, is on the agenda of many forum and boardroom meetings discussing health around the world.

UHC is a catch-all phrase for providing quality medical services to all citizens, regardless of their ability to pay.

Achieving it is a Herculean task; it requires immense resources — people, money and methods.

The collective body of global health leaders is betting big on digital technologies to break the long-standing barriers to health, including efficiency, information sharing, and access.

Digital health — the convergence of information communication technologies and health — has gained a lot of traction as an engine for innovation to address challenges afflicting the health sector.

During the World Health Assembly last year, delegates agreed on a resolution to prioritise the development and use of such digital technologies to advance UHC.

Digital health applications can be tailored to trigger alerts if medicine and medical stocks ran low.

Clinical digital systems can be programmed to pop out alerts when drugs are prescribed to a patient who has an allergic reaction to them.

They enable communication between health workers and the communities that they serve. They provide a platform for health workers to upgrade their skills.

Digital technologies are an effective channel for notifying authorities about births and deaths in communities.

Using technology, patients in far-flung enclaves can be facilitated to consult specialist doctors in well-resourced cities or countries at a small fee.

But the current digital health landscape is not heart-warming; its contours are fraught with challenges.

Countries up and down the African region are ailed by fragmented digital health systems.

Many of these systems, though developed with good intentions, are sometimes an impediment to the provision of optimal health.

They are so balkanised that they can’t share information with each other — a factor considered critical to provision of quality health services.

If technology is the central nervous system for UHC, these systems need to be fine-tuned and overhauled.

This feat requires ironclad commitment from governments for long-term funding, upgrade of health workforce skills to meet 21-century demands and effective collaboration across the health and ICT sectors.

Though daunting, these challenges are not insurmountable. In fact, the odds are in our favour: in a world home to 7.8 billion people, mobile connections globally now stand at 7.6 billion.

The number of mobile health products and services has doubled in the past five years in developing countries.

There are now more than 170,000 mobile applications for health services in the world.

The improved network reliability, cloud computing services and data analytics are adding impetus to the promise of digital health.

Here is my point: digital technology opens roads to numerous opportunities. It can take healthcare to the furthest and poorest communities — the very promise of UHC.