How a new digital partnership can improve health care services in developing countries

CANBERRA — By combining medical knowledge with a data collection and analysis platform, a new partnership between digital health care support companies THINKMD and Ona is aiming to deliver innovative health services and support to people living in developing countries. Through MEDSINC, Vermont-based THINKMD provides a mobile clinical assessment platform that enables minimally-skilled health care workers to gather patient information, assess severity of illness, and receive treatment recommendations. Ona, a Nairobi- and Washington, D.C.-based vendor for the Open Smart Register Platform, or OpenSRP, supports the creation of a comprehensive digital health register platform that can be integrated into a country’s existing health information systems and architecture — and enable analytics of national health. By combining the technologies of THINKMD and Ona, the two companies aim to seamlessly connect users to real time clinical assessment and monitoring data from field-based health programs to local, regional, and national health information systems — improving the ability for health care workers to assess and treat health concerns, including NGOs supporting health programs. The companies hope that health systems can capture more accurate and timely population data to improve the quality of health care delivered by government and nongovernment health care programs and agencies. “Ona’s OpenSRP is an industry standard that connects MEDSINC to an array of platforms and tools that integrate into national health systems like DHIS 2,” Nick Donowitz, chief operating officer of THINKMD, explained to Devex. “The combined technical offering — MEDSINC AND OpenSRP — should attract an increased user base because of the technical problems this offering solves for clients.” Supporting improved health care THINKMD was founded in 2014 to develop solutions addressing the growing shortage of health care professionals along with challenges in health care delivery. Their team today consists of clinicians, engineers, data scientists, strategists, and global health specialists who aim to leverage public health data that can improve clinical outcomes, surveillance, and health care management globally. The company has been working to improve MEDSINC by validating the platform with international partners, including UNICEF, the United States Agency for International Development and Save the Children, in multiple countries. “We implemented a validation study with community health workers seeing more than 1000 children in four countries to validate our technology,” Donowitz said. “What we continue to see is that with minimal training — even just 2 to 4 hours — health workers can quickly adopt our technology and begin to generate clinical assessments that correlate with the assessments of local clinicians.” The capacity of community health workers in resource-poor areas is variable depending on the quality and consistency of training available, and their previous level of medical experience. But generally, said Donowitz, most lack the ability to fully support the health needs of the community. “We find that compliance with protocols is rarely adequate with much room for improvement regarding clinical assessment acumen,” he said. “What we continue to show is that, with limited training, our technology can quickly increase the health care capacity of minimally-skilled health workers and enable them to generate clinical assessments that correlate well with local clinicians. Because our technology guides and trains a health worker as they use the platform, we also empower a health worker to improve their skills and consistency over time.” By being accessible offline, MEDSINC can support health care workers in the most remote regions of the world. Combining knowledge with impact Donowitz explained that THINKMD is constantly looking at ways to improve their technology and increase impact, which are tested using system performance data and user testing to ensure that the health products are having the desired impact on health workers and the people they are supporting within communities. But partnering with Ona is another way of increasing impact as well as improving health care knowledge and capability at both community and national levels. By enabling the health data of remote populations to be incorporated into national health repositories through Ona’s services, national policies can incorporate the needs of people living outside major cities. Funding can be better targeted and programs can be developed to respond to regional or demographic-specific health issues identified throughout the country. The important thing, Donowitz says, is to get the combined offering out in the field to their clients to make a bigger impact — and it may lead to bigger opportunities in the future. “We are in discussions with multiple groups to roll out this combined functionality and this is the most important next step in this partnership,” Donowitz said.