Description of Session
Healthy Kids / Brighter Futures (HK/BF) is an organization based in Zambia training teachers to serve as frontline health workers in Zambian schools for their child and adolescent student populations. Having deep relationships with both the Zambian Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education, HK/BF has aligned stakeholders supporting their healthcare delivery model and their success in Zambia. In order to streamline both health worker training and data collection, HK/BF adopted THINKMD’s clinical assessment software and data analytics offering in 2019 and rolled it out to 200 of its teachers. In addition to clinical assessments and referral functionality, the software was also customized to support mass drug administrations for Vitamin A, Praziquantel (Schistosomiasis) and Albendazole (Helminths) and to report on suspected cases of high-risk diseases. The implementation of this digital clinical assessment and data analytics platform has significantly expanded clinical healthcare capacity and program monitoring and evaluation, has decreased reporting times by over half (from 1-3 months to 2-3 weeks) and increased the ability of program and government staff to visualize disease burdens within each school district through customized data visualizations generated specifically for this purpose. The partners believe that expanding this technology to include real-time population disease surveillance, predictive modeling algorithms, and an embedded automated alert system will dramatically improve the coordination between ministries, clinics, NGOs, and schools. Automating alerts from school health data will provide daily visual summaries of the temporal change in disease burden from which automatic alerts for infectious and high-risk disease sets can be generated. The partners are confident that this innovative school-based healthcare delivery model combined with advanced clinical software and data analytics capabilities will enable faster and more efficient scaling of the healthcare impact already being achieved.
