During her tenure as Director General of the World Health Organization, Norwegian physician and politician Gro Brundtland published a paper titled “The Globalization of Health” about the importance of increasing awareness of international public health crises. Brundtland writes with urgency, but her tone is optimistic.
“There can be no real growth without healthy populations,” she says. “No sustainable development without tackling disease and malnutrition. No international security without assisting crisis-ridden countries. No hope for the spread of freedom and democracy unless we treat health as a basic human right.”
No real headway into technology can be made without healthy populations, either, so healthcare technology has had difficulties rising above the fray. But what if growing health technology is symbiotic with improving health?
There are a number of problems facing the rise of healthcare technology in the developing world. For one, problems like government mistrust, lack of reliable power, and poor infrastructure get in the way of innovation, especially when regarding modern healthcare technology.
The lack of development among these nations forces them to import much technology, which then leads to a lack of expertise, spare parts, and required consumables for the repair of these machines.
Groups like Design that Matters have tried tackling issues like these by reforming their problem-solving approach. Concerned about high infant mortality rates, the non-profit agency noticed the uselessness of donated, high-tech baby incubators in developing countries that didn’t have the technology or knowledge, or parts to maintain them.
After some thought, a group of RISD grads designed an incubator made of car parts, which are locally available in developing countries, allowing for easy upkeep and durability.
Furthermore, many developing countries face unique bureaucratic issues in their healthcare systems as well. In Brazil, for instance, the adoption of many advanced healthcare devices is determined by hospitals and clinics, influenced more by physicians and industry sales reps than legislators or third-party private sector payers.
Therefore, systems like Brazil can’t promote widespread adoption of medical technologies without legislative change and other innovative approaches in the public sector to promote an institutional and professional desire to improve patient care.
But maybe the answer isn’t necessarily introducing a barrage of devices to hospitals and clinics throughout the third world. Why not try enabling these nations instead? Telecommunications projects would require less of an investment from the international community than, say, the Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978, which promised universal healthcare by the year 2000. Needless to say, it fell on its face.
But the Internet is a different story. Ten years ago, nearly the entire continent was off the radar. Today, all 54 nations have direct Internet access in big cities, and the amount of Internet users has increased by 640% since the year 2000. This is an ideal platform for healthcare to build on.
The Internet provides databases and medical journals that benefit doctors, and its effects have already been observed. Medical schools in the developing world faced empty libraries when the WHO launched the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) in 2002.
In collaboration with BMJ Publishing, HINARI improved free and low-cost access to scientific information online for these universities, so that the world’s leading medical journals are not available in close to 100 of the world’s poorest countries.
Barbara Aronson, Program Manager of the HINARI initiative at the WHO, believes that “access to these general and specialist medical journals is already making a difference to research and the drive to find local solutions to local health issues.”
HINARI isn’t the only group to use heightened Internet access to better healthcare.
Smaller groups are headquartering themselves in areas outside of city centers and using the Internet to connect to urban hospitals, providing forms of remote care to patients in need.
In Kitengela, forty minutes from the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, is Penda Health, a new type of private clinic for the area’s poor population, who too often resorts to underwhelming public facilities.
The clinic employs devices that run on mobile broadband, stressing the importance of portable access to patient health information. Penda has developed a tracking system for drug and equipment use that warns them when supplies run low and sends them text messages to follow treatment plans.
Penda’s staff also consults experts in the city, sending over emails and digital photos on special cases if they need additional consultation.
Dr. Felix Olale, of capital brokerage company Excelsior Firm, knows what technology can do for increased quality of healthcare in developing countries.
“Technology is by far the best, easiest, and most effective way to improve access to quality care,” he recently said in a BBC special on Penda Health.
And we know he’s right. A push for telecommunications technologies across nations is the first step to ending healthcare provisions, which are more Russian roulette than a helping hand to residents of the third world.
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