Infrastructure

The basis for the WelTel mHealth program came from a clinical study conducted by Dr. Richard Lester, scientific director of WelTel and faculty in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. “Cell phones are everywhere in Africa and usage costs are very low," says Dr. Lester. “This makes them a great tool for patient care in a resource limited setting like rural Kenya."

arma's innovation is a telemedicine model that focuses on providing affordable, equitable and reliable primary healthcare to India's rural poor. They operate a network 16 'e-Doctor' clinics in rural India that provide nurse-assisted online medical consultations with qualified and specialist doctors.

PATH an international nonprofit organization and leader in global health innovation, and Sinapi biomedical, a South African medical device manufacturer, collaborated to design and develop the Ellavi UBT. This is the first and only low-cost, fully assembled UBT designed specifically for use in low-resource health facilities. The Ellavi UBT addresses cost, assembly, and safety of current UBT's, adding lifesaving technology in the hands of health care workers.

The project aims to establish a sustainable system to promote proper, timely and accurate Jaundice treatment in Africa. We intend to increase availability and affordability of appropriate medical devices and their service through setting up a local manufacturing and maintenance unit in Ghana. In order assure the successful implementation we plan to pilot the locally produced Jaundice Kit in 20 urban and rural hospitals in West Africa, to gather evidence for further scaling up.

Lack of fast, affordable delivery of blood profoundly restricts the number of lifesaving transfusions performed in the Dodoma region. We will use an autonomous Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) called Stork to transport screened and typed blood from a blood bank in Dodoma to peripheral health facilities, on-demand. In many cases, ground transport of blood would either be impossible or too costly using traditional means. Stork can already deliver over 1kg over 75km in less than 45 minutes at a cost of $10, outperforming all known alternatives.

Muso and its government partners have designed Proactive Community Case Management (ProCCM), an operating system for health care delivery optimized to reach every patient early. Prepared for global scale, ProCCM deploys proactive doorstep care: Community Health Workers (CHWs) actively search for patients door-to-door, and connect them to lifesaving care.

Maisha Meds is a technology-enabled healthcare company committed to ensuring that essential medicines are available and accessible to low income patients across Africa. We have seen firsthand that discounts on medications given to pharmacies and manufacturers are often not passed along to patients, and that low-income patients often pay very high prices for essential medications.

Fekede Kebede of Jimma University in Ethiopia will develop a software tool consistent with the standard treatment guidelines of the country that will be used to send short messages to mobile phones of chronic disease patients to remind them of their medication dosage instructions and refilling and appointment schedules to improve the quality of medical care by improving treatment adherence.

Ahmed Ebrahim of St. Paul Hospital Millenium Medical College in Ethiopia will develop an electronic stethoscope, similar to the currently available manual stethoscopes but with advanced technology to overcome those low sound levels that cannot be easily picked up by traditional stethoscopes.

Shimals Nigusse of Alert Center in Ethiopia will develop a system of telemedicine using video conferencing technology to provide consultation services for the health workers working at remote health facilities on TB and HIV cases to improve access and quality of TB and HIV services.