Enhancing patient safety and healthcare compliance: Re-imagining healthworker and carer training in infection prevention and control
Example: Walk us through a specific example(s) of how this solution makes a difference; include its primary activities.
Impact: What is the impact of the work to date? Also describe the projected future impact for the coming years.
Spread Strategies: Moving forward, what are the main strategies for scaling impact?
Financial Sustainability Plan: What is this solution’s plan to ensure financial sustainability?
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Founding Story
Team
BI operations cover the health care spectrum from hospitals to community clinics, to patients at home, as well as animal welfare. Infection prevention and control is a challenge in all those sectors, and improving the resilience of health systems means working in all three sectors. The healthcare crisis associated with chronic diseases such as diabetes means that novel ways are needed for empowering the patient and their carers to do more for themselves. IPC is particularly important when patients may be immunocompromised. Ensuring safe care is as important as providing the diagnostics to diagnose and drugs to treat. We have close links with global health policy makers and leaders in global health.
Distribution Channels, Research and Development, Specific Disease Expertise, Relationships/New Contacts, Marketing/Communications Support, Human Resources, Legal Support, Technology Expertise, Public Policy Knowledge, Access to Capital.
We are seeking to scale up access to this training system from West Africa building on BI's global reach, to provide access to the ebuddi systems of adaptive learning from healthcare centres to homes. Legal support with licensing arrangements is important to generate revenue as an enterprise, but ensure front line workers in Africa have access to the best possible training.
BI also places great value in building the skills of its workforce and those insights are also relevant
R&D is important as we build the evidence base of our impact on learning outcomes.
We need development capital.
Deep understanding of an unmet need in a specific market/context, Access to and established trust with customers/beneficiaries, Insights into behavior change.
Holistic solutions that work across the entire care continuum (including education, prevention, detection, treatment, management, follow-up), Remote care solutions for health management, treatment, and diagnosis.
Enhancing Patient Safety through better infection prevention and control capacity building and healthcare compliance.
The digital platform for building competencies as well as improving healthcare compliance can also be used to explore the link between competency, health practice and health outcomes underpinned by GIS data. Building on the potential of such analytics would be a key outcome for the collaboration.
This is one of the key opportunities opened up by the 'digital healthcare' opportunity.
Initiatives such as mPESA (in mobile banking) in East Africa show how digital opportunities can be as significant in emerging markets as they are in more mature, developed markets.
a new service, other (please explain below).
Insights into digital health.
Improve infection prevention and control as well as patient safety by further development of, and scaling the ebuddi model - an interactive and intuitive simulation based training underpinned by powerful analytics, that has been developed to train community health workers in response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa.
MiiHealth Ltd was created to catalyse a transformation in IPC training, through applying technology enhanced learning to improve knowledge retention, confidence and ultimately competence – and to make quality assured training accessible worldwide.
This project would mark a move beyond Ebola related training and West Africa to show how the platform developed and insights gained have a relevance to healthcare across the globe. The massive investment in pharmaceuticals and other healthcare technologies will only lead to improved health outcomes if there is an associated advance in the competencies of healthcare workers and carers to be able able to use them properly and minimise the risk of opportunistic infections. We will use this project to mark a new phase of development and application of the ebuddi system.
Patient welfare and safety is at the heart of BI's human health business, and infection prevention and control is a theme that underpins both human and veterinary care.
However we think there are broader, more strategic reasons why the MiiHealth Initiative could be of strategic importance to BI.
In the McKinsey article ‘How pharma can win in a digital world’ McKinsey consultants spoke to 20 leading executives to find out how they cope—and what they do to stay ahead. The backdrop to this research was that in 2014, digital health investments topped $6.5 billion, compared with $2.9 billion a year earlier.
The sheer scale of this investment raises the question for pharmaceutical companies as to how to ensure their investments leverage existing insights and open up new opportunities for adding value to their health solutions.
The article highlighted the fact that there is a consensus that: ‘as healthcare continues to digitize, pharma companies must transform themselves in basic ways to stay competitive. Successful ones will rethink their business and operating models, transform their cultures and capabilities, and adopt a new, longer-term mind-set that fosters innovation and bold strategic moves.
The article concluded that winning will involve ‘developing a collaborative culture and challenging barriers to sharing, and reinventing companies by building capabilities beyond traditional healthcare and updating the operating model.’
A co-creation project with MiiHealth could be of strategic value in 3 main ways:
1) Adding value to the service proposition and improving health outcomes
Dr. Krishna Yeshwant of Google Ventures pinpoints the challenge in this potential future: “For pharma, there comes the question of whether they can tie digital to the assets they have. There is an interesting broader conversation to have with pharmacos about moving from a products-and-pills company to a solutions company.”
The associate director of US medical affairs of a global pharma company commented “One of the most exciting values of digital to the pharmaceutical industry is how technology may be able to supplement or support pharmacological therapies to more effectively address the problem of suboptimal outcomes.”
This latter point is exactly where MiiHealth could help, tying in data on competence and compliance to health outcomes. Because the training can be provided on tablets, there is the potential to link competence with GIS data which can then be linked through to health outcomes. This opportunity to link health outcomes to GIS data through to compliance and competence could be as significant as the use of health economics data to improve the cost effectiveness of clinical practice.
This is based on almost 30 years of insights involving health economics which started in 1987 when I led a collaboration with Prof Alan Maynard at York University for Smith Kline to look at the cost effectiveness of different vaccine strategies. This became one of the pioneering studies within the pharmaceutical industry on health economics.
2) As a tool for empowering the carer within health and social care
This recognises that where healthcare takes place is changing. As BI UK pointed out in their White paper ‘Empowering the carer within health and social care’ what the NHS needs to deliver to survive as a 21st century institution, includes taking care out of the hospital and back into the community, wherever possible. This will require giving the families and carers the knowledge, confidence and competence to care effectively and keep their patient, themselves and the rest of the family safe. This is true for most markets – not just in the UK.
3) Emerging markets – drivers of growth
The McKinsey Insight article ‘Africa: A continent of opportunity for pharma and patients’ concludes: ‘In a world of slowing and stagnating markets, Africa represents the last geographic frontier where high growth is still achievable. As ever, the key to success lies in understanding individual markets in granular detail. Early movers with the right approach should be able to capture competitive advantage. Africa will continue to grow for the foreseeable future. Now is the time for drug companies to decide whether they want to be part of that growth and, more important, play an active role in improving public health.’
A key driver of growth has been Healthcare capacity. ‘Between 2005 and 2012, Africa added 70,000 new hospital beds, 16,000 doctors, and 60,000 nurses. Healthcare provision is becoming more efficient through initiatives such as Mozambique’s switch to specialist nurse anaesthetists and South Africa’s use of nurses to initiate antiretroviral drug therapy. The introduction of innovative delivery models is increasing capacity still further.’
Building local capacity and ensuring compliance in the use of pharmaceuticals is key to growing, sustaining market development and market leadership in these fiercely competitive emerging markets.
The 2014 McKinsey article Healthcare’s digital future concluded:
‘Digitally enabled healthcare is here, and most pharmaceutical companies aren’t ready. Despite access to unprecedented data and technologies that can be used to drive better health outcomes by influencing customer behavior, few are truly exploring digital-engagement models. The opportunity to learn more about consumers and develop better, more targeted products and services far outweighs the threat digitization presents companies—for now. Unless incumbent pharmaceutical companies move quickly, innovative competitors may grab a greater share of benefits and stronger customer loyalty.’
My organization will contribute:
Prototype platform / product which has been developed for West Africa for training and assessing compliance.
Global health network with International organisations and policy makers
Potential insight into the learning journey through the ebuddi analytics, as well as broader insights into innovation and digital health
Boehringer Ingelheim may be able to contribute:
Its own insights into healthcare compliance and patient / carer centric care
Investment in the service
lessons learnt from virtual veterinary academy and its other digital health initiatives.
Support with competency evaluation and building evidence base around improved patient safety outcomes
Fee for service based on use of the training module as well as 'contextualised performance support' .
Insights into the training programme can be derived from analysis of the data profile from the individual learner as well as training programme.
As the data set grows with time and scale, the analytics will provide ever greater insight and scope for adding value to the customer (be they in the public or private sector).
Ensuring appropriate contextualisation of the learning material
Ensuring an appropriate balance between maximising access to ebuddi as a training tool for frontline workers in low income countries as well as generating revenue from wealthier countries - not unlike the challenge around anti retroviral therapy.
Responding to the need to enable the training to be accessible on a specified tablet to a 'Bring your own device model'
We have interest in our approach from health agencies in:
- the US (agencies addressing the challenge of health security and outbreak response
- Europe (EU DG Sante and the European CDC), as well as expressions of interest from a number of healthcare Ministers,
- Africa
- Asia
Our specific is global and the team has already been involved in initiatives which have sought to reshape the global health agenda
I’d like to implement together.
Agencies involved in global health policy and practice - with a particular concern about infection prevention and patient safety. These include:
Public Health England
Department of Health
WHO Patient Safety Group
CDC
ECDC (European Centre for Disease Control)
EU DG Sante
DFID