Tech innovations offer hope for overburdened Africa health care system

Nairobi, Kenya — Overcrowding in African hospitals is blamed on the scarcity of health facilities and doctors, especially in rural areas.

According to the United Nations, there is only one doctor for every 5,000 people in Africa, a continent that bears 25% of the global disease burden. But with the number of mobile phone users on the rise, some technological innovations are helping to bridge the doctor-patient gap and expand health care coverage. 

Yaw Asamoah is head of MedPharma Care in Ghana. The company has developed an app that allows patients to connect face-to-face with doctors and pharmacies online so they can get medicine in their homes.

He says the system improves patients’ experiences when they seek health care services.

“That’s where MedPharma care comes in to see how we can digitize the whole idea of health care bringing telemedicine — making it possible for people either [to] have e-consultation, e-prescription, get their medicine delivered to them wherever they are, either at the office or at home… do their diagnostic remotely,” Asamoah said.

The World Health Organization says 57 countries are suffering from a critical shortage of health personnel, 36 of them in Africa.

The 2001 Abuja Declaration requires that African Union countries allocate 15% of their annual budgets to health, a requirement most governments have yet to fulfill.

Funding and infrastructure issues have blocked millions of Africans’ access to quality health care, but experts say digital tools could improve access to services in hard-to-reach areas that lack doctors.

Mountaga Keita is a Guinean-born businessman who invented three portable diagnostic terminals which can monitor a patient’s temperature, blood pressure, heart function and conduct ultrasounds.

“The benefit of that is the ease it brings to doctors and patients instead of clogging hospitals,” Keita said. “Now the doctors or nurses can get to the patient collected data and send the data in a very secure manner to the hospitals, and people can analyze and bring it back to the patient.”

Keita has so far deployed 40 kits to different hospitals in Guinea.

According Keita, the diagnostic terminals have attracted the attention of other countries like Gabon, which has requested six machines. He is in talks with the governments of Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Senegal to supply the kits there.

Keita said his technology can help solve the doctor-to-patient ratio problem and save patients money.   

“With this kind of technology, all the vital signs of a patient, forward it in a very secure manner, encrypted to a specialist who is in Tunisia, who is in Kenya, who is in Tokyo, Paris to interpret and bring the result,” he said. “Then we know if we are supposed to spend that 45,000 euros to evacuate … or if we can locally cure the person.”

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has grown expansively and gained attention in Africa.

Asamoah said telemedicine provides access to many doctors who specialize in different diseases, easing the burden on health care facilities. 

“In a normal circumstance, if you went to a clinic in Ghana, you wanted to talk to a specialized consultant, you might probably not get either because they don’t have, they haven’t booked you, or they are not available,” he said. “But telemedicine can make it possible for you to make your appointment and talk to any doctor.”

McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, analyzed the impact of digital health tools in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa and found that the tools could reduce the continent’s total health care costs by 15% by 2030.
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