healthcare technology

The use of technology in health care has proven to increases care providers, the capabilities and to patients, access to improved quality of healthcare. During the GDD summit organized by BAO Systems, it occurred that some of the most beneficial countries include Nigeria.

 

Speaking at the summit, InStrat Global Health Solution (InStratGHS) CEO, Okey Okuzu, discussed the design, deployment, and impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool – EWORS for TB case finding in Nigeria. EWORS is built on the MediXcel Digital Health Platform by Plus91

 

“Our goal is to overcome barriers to healthcare delivery in low resource settings presented by infrastructural challenges,” he noted. “We achieve this by leveraging mobile health technologies that allow for smooth flow of information across the health system for more effective patient health management or policy decisions regardless of physical location.”

 

The MediXcel-EWORS system is designed to drive actionable AI for public health intervention by sieving through a large volume of data to enable specific geospatial identification of disease cases and also predict the possibility of an outbreak based on historical data and set algorithm threshold.

 

This helps local surveillance personnel to make data-informed decisions to curb the spread of diseases. Field data, captured on android devices wirelessly transferred to a cloud server for storage and analysis.

 

“The EWORS engine conducts advanced analytics to detect unexpected elevations in indicator data and populates this information on real-time GIS heat maps, reports, and alert notifications,” he added.

 

The alert notifications are generated in form of emails/SMS and sent to designated individuals when data from local areas exceed set thresholds, indicating undetected community spread. Designated teams review alarms and mobilize to conduct mass screening outreach at Alarm locations.

 

Under a USAID-funded program led by the KNCV TB Foundation, and in partnership with Plus91 PVT, InStrat GHS deployed its EWORS predictive engine to 14 Nigerian states as a solution to find undetected TB cases in the country. The Analyses of the data from program inception to date demonstrate that prioritization of case finding outreach efforts, based on hotspot analytics and alarms, increases the yield of those efforts.

 

This strategy is crucial to finding missing TB cases and improving case-finding, especially in low resource settings,

 

read more at https://www.cio.co.ke/role-of-ai-in-healthcare-tb-prevalence-in-nigeria/

 

read about Instrats at https://instratghs.com/

 

read about Plus91 and MediXcel at https://plus91.in/about-us/

 

read about KCNV at https://kncvnigeria.org/

 

Web-based technology has dramatically improved our ability to detect communicable disease outbreaks, with the potential to reduce morbidity and mortality because of swift public health action.

 

Apps accessible through the internet and on mobile devices create an opportunity to enhance our traditional indicator-based surveillance systems, which have high specificity but issues with timeliness.

Objective: The aim of this study is to describe the literature on web-based apps for indicator-based surveillance and response to acute communicable disease outbreaks in the community with regard to their design, implementation, and evaluation.

Results: Apps were primarily designed to improve the early detection of disease outbreaks, targeted government settings, and comprised either complex algorithmic or statistical outbreak detection mechanisms or both.

 

We identified a need for these apps to have more features to support secure information exchange and outbreak response actions, with a focus on outbreak verification processes and staff and resources to support app operations.

 

Conclusions: Public health officials designing new or improving existing disease outbreak web-based apps should ensure that outbreak detection is automatic and signals are verified by users, the app is easy to use, and staff and resources are available to support the operations of the app and conduct rigorous and holistic evaluations.

 

read the study at https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/4/e24330