New eye popping medical technology provides earlier diagnosis, reduces cost and a breakthrough range of other benefits for both patients and health care professionals. Victor Okeke writes. Current health system technologies promise delivery of affordable healthcare to rural communities. This promise makes more meaning because rural clinics in Nigeria face a peculiar problem of the unwillingness of healthcare practitioners to work in remote communities and has negatively affected the quality of care provided in such communities. Many times the high fixed costs associated with bringing specialists in-house is cost prohibitive for smaller medical facilities. There is also the challenge of non-availability of medical equipment. Many community health centres are clinics by name with medical equipment or consumables to attend to patients’ need. Ultimately, the result is diminished patient care and lost revenue for these medical facilities.According to Chibundu “You can also have an x-ray attached to it which our technology partners are working out the best way to fit in the x-ray to the entire equipment because some of these equipment that we are attaching to it are not proprieted to the technology. So a patient who has no access to any form of laboratory test to determine if it is fever, malaria, and typhoid or whether there is a heart condition now has access to all these tests, meanwhile these are services that are available at the state level.”On how the technology will be accessed by the rural audience, he said it is very simple as the community people don’t necessarily need to know how the technology works. “The person that we are more concerned about is the trained paramedic that is going to be attached to this technology to manage it. The solution is menu-drive. All the person does is to key-in to it, getting the person a little knowledgeable about the system itself.
“The person is already a paramedic and all we do is to train the person between one to two weeks on the basis of manipulating the system itself, knowing the element of the software that is available and knowing the equipment is attached to it. That is all the person needs to know and the patient doesn’t need to know anything. All the patient needs is proper diagnosis and all the patient is required to do is to provide the right samples,” he said. This technology will not only reduce the cost of accessing care for patients, government will spend less employing doctors that will go to these facilities at the community levels. “You can now have at the local government level two or three doctors and they manage effectively and efficiently the patients with these primary health solutions that are embedded in the communities. “One the main challenges is that of getting the awareness across to the stakeholders and getting the stakeholders to believe that this solution will actually solve a lot of problems at that level and getting their partnership into this solution,” he added.
