Dear subscriber,
When your local hospital cannot provide a test, getting a diagnosis may mean another journey and another expense. Helping hospitals arrange more tests for their patients could make care closer to home more useful.
Treezer Michelle Atieno -Editor
Hospitals need equipment and specialist staff to offer advanced diagnostic tests, but may not see enough patients to cover those costs. A new partnership between The Pathology Network and Cerba Lancet Kenya shows how digital platforms can help hospitals offer more tests by connecting them to laboratories already providing those services.
Instead of buying equipment and employing specialists for tests it rarely performs, a hospital can send samples to a partner laboratory and pay for testing. It can expand the services available to patients without taking on the full cost of running them.
The partnership expands testing available through Spes360. The platform lets hospitals order tests and track samples. It also makes it easier to open new hospitals because labs and lab experts can be outsourced.
Our take: Hospitals can use laboratory partnerships to establish demand for additional tests before deciding which services justify their own equipment and staff…Read more (2 min)
Too many hospitals invest in digital systems without improving patient care. Mike Adeyemi-Lawal, a digital health and infectious diseases expert argues that healthcare businesses should identify what causes delays before choosing the right technology to invest in, if they want to ensure access and continuity of quality services.
“The software functioned. The system around it did not,” he writes. His argument applies to artificial intelligence too: Identifying more patients needing treatment achieves little if referral services cannot accommodate them.
Before investing, he recommends examining how patients move through care and establishing who will fund the technology after its initial launch.
Read the full opinion…Read more (2 min)
Africa’s two continental health-data platforms promise to consolidate information that can support businesses to plan services and supplies. Making that information reliable and usable requires agreement on how countries share it. A newly validated governance framework advances those rules.
This follows the launches of Africa CDC’s repository and the World Health Organisation’s regional hub.Manufacturers need disease trends to estimate medicine demand; hospital investors need evidence of underserved areas. Shared rules could help countries contribute information to these platforms more consistently and improve the intelligence available for those decisions.
Validated on 22 October, the framework would guide national legislation and support secure cross-border sharing while countries retain oversight. It advances the governance work behind Africa’s data investments.
Our take: Businesses need dependable information from Africa’s data hubs, without having to resolve conflicting figures themselves…Read more (2 min)
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Amref launches a hub to scale healthcare innovations in Africa
Events
🗓️ Attend the Future of Health Conference in Nigeria (Oct 30)
🗓️ Join the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria Annual National Conference (Nov 2)
🗓️ Participate in the Global Health Supply Chain Summit in Ethiopia (Nov 17)
Jobs
🧑⚕️ Be the Chief Programme Officer at Living Goods (Kenya)
🧑⚕️ Join UNICEF as a Health Specialist in Adolescent Health (Kenya)
🧑⚕️ Apply to be the Programme Director at AngloGold Malaria Control (Ghana)
Various
💉 WHO urges coordinated action against Ebola in Africa
💉 Nigeria to host first Global Antimicrobial Resistance Conference in Africa
💉 Africa CDC summons health ministers as Ebola spreads
Seen on LinkedIn
Charles Otira, Co-founder of CIAN Teleradiology, says, “I increasingly see digital health infrastructure not as an IT expense, but as part of the financial and operational infrastructure of a modern hospital.”