Today, 1 billion people around the world will never receive care from a trained health professional. Despite all of the advancements we have made, at least half of the world’s population cannot obtain essential health services. The vast majority of those lacking sufficient care live in poor countries – hospitals are simply stretched too thin, sometimes serving hundreds of thousands of people across areas that may span 100 miles.
In order to address this gap, community health workers have stepped up to provide care for their neighbors. Unfortunately, these informal health workers do not have all of the training and resources they need to succeed. Medic Mobile, a nonprofit founded in 2010 to improve health outcomes in hard-to-reach places, is building software that supports these health workers, specifically in the last mile of care. The organization builds and delivers a free, scalable software kit that helps community health workers provide better care to people in underserved communities. Its systems are integrated, streamlined and data-driven.
Recently, with support from the Vodafone Americas Foundation, Medic Mobile began rolling out a brand-new approach to measuring and improving health equity, which aims to make care more equally accessible for everyone. Through the new approach and process, called the Equity Lens, Medic Mobile and its system partners can see how the health system performs for specific sub-groups of people within a local population. For example, it is possible to track factors such as wealth, education, and gender. By breaking the population into smaller demographics, real-time analysis of inequity is made possible.
The Equity Lens helps managers and health workers understand how they are performing across speed, quality and quantity indicators. Importantly, Medic Mobile and their partners will put the insights to use in their software and system. For example, if Medic Mobile sees that health workers are successfully achieving equity by visiting poorer families more often, the organization can encourage other health workers – through the software or training – to change the frequency and priority of their visits.
The Equity Lens was initially rolled out to a community of 1,000 health workers in Kenya and will soon be implemented in other communities across Africa.
We’re proud to support this truly innovative work, which brings together the power of health data and real-time analysis, with a focus on people and quality of care. If you’d like to learn more about Medic Mobile and find out how you can get involved, visit their website: medicmobile.org.