Enhancing Doctor-Patient Communication via SMS
Africa's Talking Ltd would like to provide patients in developing countries with an easy way to access information from their doctors. Patients in resource-constrained areas mostly rely on their doctors to provide all the health education they need during their few hospital visits. Health education is a continuous process that requires continuous learning and reinforcement but due to financial constraints of making hospital visits and the high number of patients served per doctor, they are unable to access the information that they need to manage their health. We aim to close this gap by linking the doctors and patients through SMS. SMSLeopard will enable doctors to manage SMS just as they manage email making it easy for two way communication with their patients.
About You
About You
First Name
Stephen
Last Name
Warui
Facebook Profile
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Africa's Talking
Organization Website
Organization Phone
+254-20-3570095
Organization Address
P.O. BOX 28044-00100
Organization Country
Kenya, NA
Country where this project is creating social impact
Kenya, CE
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Enhancing Doctor-Patient Communication via SMS
What change do you want to bring to the world?
Africa's Talking Ltd would like to provide patients in developing countries with an easy way to access information from their doctors. Patients in resource-constrained areas mostly rely on their doctors to provide all the health education they need during their few hospital visits. Health education is a continuous process that requires continuous learning and reinforcement but due to financial constraints of making hospital visits and the high number of patients served per doctor, they are unable to access the information that they need to manage their health. We aim to close this gap by linking the doctors and patients through SMS. SMSLeopard will enable doctors to manage SMS just as they manage email making it easy for two way communication with their patients.
What are the primary activities of your project?
The primary activity will involve educating health care providers on how to use the SMSLeopard as a regular communication tool to maximize the care of their patients. Secondly, patients will also be educated on how to use the system to communicate with their doctors.
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Most developing countries suffer from an acute shortage of doctors. This means that each doctor is responsible for a very large number of patients at a time. The result is that each patient spends very little time with the doctor. Given that patients in resource-constrained areas mostly rely on their doctors to provide their health education, the result is that there is a patient education gap.
Health education and preventative services have usually been limited to outreach programs, education lessons at the various health institutions, and audio visual channels such as radio, posters and television. Whilst these are effective for short-term campaigns, they are not effective for long-term health education reinforcement.
SMSLeopard is a communication tool that opens up a communication channel between doctors and patients using SMS. Most patients in developing countries have access to a basic mobile phone and this means that SMS provides a cost effective,simple and constant mode of communication between health care workers and their patients.
SMSLeopard is a versatile communication tool that allows health workers to communicate with patients via SMS on their computer. It allows them to send bulk SMS to pre-determined patient groups, send reminders for hospital appointments, drug compliance, updates as well as receive and answer questions from patients in local languages if need be. SMSLeopard is highly scalable, allowing health service providers to communicate with a large group of patients in different locations and regions.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for less than a year
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
SMSLeopard seeks to provide a communication solution for doctors working in resource constrained areas but whose patients have access to the mobile phone. There are more than 500 million mobile phones users in Africa, making SMS a viable mass communication channel. Our target populations are the working poor. They do not have access to the internet, live far from a health facility, and whose health facilities have a high patient to doctor ration. In addition, they lack alternative means of accessing good health information, are likely to speak a local language, and are mostly subsistence farmers or casual laborers. The doctors that will use SMSLeopard are likely to be highly educated, technologically savvy, have access to the internet through the hospital,and are well read but under staffed in their jobs.
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
SMSLeopard is a product of Africa's Talking Ltd, an IT company based in Nairobi. Dr Stephen Warui who has been a medical officer in several hospitals in Central Kenya for over four years witnessed a demonstration of SMSLeopard during a visit to the company. As an experienced doctor, Dr Warui was quick to see the potential of SMS as a way for regular patient communication to improve health and health outcomes. He saw that SMS alerts could be used to provide an avenue for alerting the patient on upcoming appointments, drug compliance, health updates as well as general patient communication.
Dr Warui then decided to implement it in a pilot project for the Diabetes Support Group at the Murang'a District Hospital, which is a Ministry of Medical Services of the Government of Kenya. The Diabetes Support Group consisted of about 240 patients who were mostly in their middle to old ages. The support group met on a monthly basis at the hospital to encourage each other and have an open forum with the doctor and nutritionist.
The support group members traveled from about a 40km radius which made it expensive and tiresome for many of them to attend. Communication among the group was mostly done through word of mouth during meetings and Dr. Warui saw the potential to use SMSLeopard as a communication system to notify them of meetings, receive their questions and send health information alerts to them in the local Kikuyu language. From this pilot was borne the realization of the potential to use SMSLeopard as a communication tool for health care personnel.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
Africa's Talking Ltd has developed SMSLeopard an SMS management system that can be used by health professionals to communicate with their patients via SMS.SMSLeopard runs on the computer and is as easy to use as email, which makes it possible for doctors to engage with a large number of patients at once.
Our implementation of SMSLeopard with a diabetes support group is still in pilot phase. Dr Stephen Warui has been able to collect the phone numbers of more than 200 participants of the project, who will receive alerts, updates, reminders and education on diets, exercise, drugs compliance and complications in their local Kikuyu language.
Dr. Warui intends to publish a paper on the intervention after six months to document and tract the impact. The indicators of good diabetes control such as HbA1c, Body Mass Index (BMI), cholesterol levels, reduced incidence of complications such as renal disease, retinopathy and curtailed progression in patients with existing complications will be monitored.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
101-1,000
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
Within six months, Dr. Warui intends to present a peer-reviewed paper on the results of using SMS within a diabetes support group to enhance patient doctor interaction.
Task 1
Development and translation of the SMS curriculum
Task 2
Monitoring and tracking the progress of patients
Task 3
Writing a paper on the impact of using SMS to increase doctor-patient interaction
Identify your 12-month impact milestone
Roll out of SMSLeopard to health care providers in Kenya.
Task 1
Have a peer reviewed paper on the SMS intervention
Task 2
Marketing campaign to reach out to health care providers
Task 3
Developing SMS curriculum for the most common diseases in Kenya that can be used by doctors to educate the public.
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
Over the next three years we'd like to roll out SMSLeopard for use by health providers and disease support groups in East Africa and the rest of the African continent. We also intend to enter into partnerships with doctors and health information providers to package health information in SMS curricula that can be distributed to the information poor via SMS.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
The biggest challenge will be in developing SMSLeopard to fully meet the needs of doctors and patients in order to achieve the intended outcome. We will also have to figure out how to structure SMS curricula on health information within the limits of 160 characters. Funding will also be a challenge to achieving the set targets and goals. We will need to do a lot of education and sensitization of how to use the system. We intend to overcome these challenges by partnering with organizations focused on improving health outcomes in the developing world and by developing synergistic relationships with doctors.
Tell us about your partnerships
Currently we have a partnership with Murang'a District Hospital and the diabetic support group of Murang'a. We are hoping to develop partnerships with policy makers at the Health Ministry in the Government of Kenya as well as private health care providers. We also hope to develop partnerships with health organizations especially those that target various health issues to allow them to utilize the system to further their work in expanding health care to those in remote or low resource settings.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$10,001‐50,000
Explain your selections
Currently the project is wholly funded by Africa's Talking Ltd an IT company based in Nairobi which aims to expand the use of SMSLeopard by healthcare providers in Africa. SMSLeopard is a product of Africa's Talking Ltd.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
Over the next three years we hope to have the system being used by health organizations, NGOs, public and private health institutions and various health support groups. These will sustain the program by using the system and paying for the text messages sent using the system. We aim to develop new products for the market to target lifestyle modifications and healthy living. For this to occur, it will require added staff and this may include professional consultants in product development and educators. Africa's Talking Ltd will continue to improve and develop SMSLeopard as a communication tool for use by health care providers in Africa and build in any customizations as may be required into the system.
Challenges
Which barriers to health and well-being does your innovation address?
Please select up to three in order of relevancy to your project.
PRIMARY
Lack of access to targeted health information and education
SECONDARY
Limited human capital (trained physicians, nurses, etc.)
TERTIARY
Limited access to preventative tools or resources
Please describe how your innovation specifically tackles the barriers listed above.
Whilst health information is provided by the Government, patients are not able to access it regularly and on demand to help them improve their health outcomes. The population in question has limited access to the internet and may not be able to afford frequent trips to the health institutions for purposes of education on demand. Most health institutions have access to the internet or are in the process of being connected. By targeting the link to technology currently available to the patient; the basic mobile phone the healthcare provider can use SMSLeopard as a communication tool and provide health information that will bring about change in education,behavior and in preventative services. SMSLeopard enables a health provider to be able to serve more clients through the use of technology.
How are you growing the impact of your organization or initiative?
Please select up to three potential pathways in order of relevancy to you.
PRIMARY
Grown geographic reach: Within host country
SECONDARY
Repurposed your model for other sectors/development needs
TERTIARY
Grown geographic reach: Multi-country
Please describe which of your growth activities are current or planned for the immediate future.
SMSLeopard is primarily built to increase the patient-doctor interaction via SMS. Currently we are in the process of using the system to provide education, alerts and updates to diabetics in Murang'a District of Central Kenya through their support group and clinicians. We aim to publish a paper on this pilot project that will enable us to justify the use of SMS to increase doctor-patient interaction.
Over the next one year we plan to roll out SMSLeopard as a communication tool for healthcare providers in Kenya. In addition, we intend to expand the scope of the SMSLeopard system by developing SMS curricula for other common diseases in Kenya in order to make health information available to the majority of Africans who have access to the mobile phone but lack internet access.
Do you collaborate with any of the following: (Check all that apply)
Technology providers.
If yes, how have these collaborations helped your innovation to succeed?
Africa's Talking Ltd is an IT company based in Nairobi Kenya that is working to connect Africa by building appropriate technology. Africa's Talking Ltd have developed SMSLeopard, an SMS management system that can be used by health care providers to better communicate with their patients. I have collaborated with Africa's Talking Ltd after seeing the potential of their technology to make a positive impact in health outcomes. Using SMSLeopard has provided an avenue to help me become more effective in my job as a doctor. Africa's Talking Ltd has provided SMSLeopard on a free basis to use in my project.
 | 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui updated this Competition Entry. |
| 87 weeks ago Stephen Warui submitted this idea. |
