A reasonable question to ask is why would we, sitting in the US, sponsor a panel, albeit with our friend Dr. John Muthee of SGHI, in Kenya?

It begins with the power of connectedness. A few years ago, I was asked to serve on a UN panel on technology for managing the healthcare needs for the elderly. Tiekie Barnard also served on that panel and her voice and reasoning made incredible sense and so here we are connected for a common purpose.

I have been blessed to have spent the past two decades working with two brilliant Kenyans, designing and developing systems for disaster response and healthcare management. Though our work is principally deployed in the US, we also found purpose working in conflict zones in Europe.  But at our core, our mission and vision is Africa-centric

Our thinking about empowering Africa for disaster and healthcare improvement begins with developing a Healthcare Innovation Initiative (HII).  This initiative would encourage the testing of new ideas and approaches to expand access to health care and community resilience.  As my team and I think about this we borrow from some of my early work on a NASA project developing medical kiosks as effective places for care, we then build on that with our remote patient monitoring tools leveraging emerging communication capabilities and drones (similar to what is being used in Rwanda today).  Surely, there are other ideas and concepts to meet existing and emerging needs.  HII can surface these as we contribute our work and ideas.

The benefit of living in today’s technology driven environment is the ability to solve real world problems of connected knowledge, improved logistics, assured communication, and impact at the point of need.  To be fair there will always be challenges, funding development, funding utilization, overcoming entrenched behavior of the current “as is” state among many others.  Perhaps the best attribute needed to drive change is persistence and sometimes a bit of luck or timing.

But persistence, luck and timing only matter if you have built something that solves a problem (even sometimes if others aren’t sure it’s a problem).  20 plus years ago, we built the first comprehensive incident management system for connecting public health, hospitals, nursing homes and shelters.  Two decades later that system became the core of our work in conflict areas.  The real story though is when we built the system, we had to beg 7 test hospitals to be our first users along with public health. Persistence.  Then a bit of luck and timing, a hurricane hit and the system made a real difference in responding to the tragedy.  From there the journey from 7 users to 1000 was exponential.

Can HII serve as a venue to clearly identify problems in the healthcare space?  Can HII then serve as an idea incubator testing responses to those challenges?  Can HII also help bridge ideas with other existing technology partners?  Can HII help find institutional champions willing to consider doing things a new way to solve old problems?

I am not sure. However, I know that empowering Africa at the 2024 Africa Shared Value & ESG Summit offers an opportunity to meet like-minded people with new ideas and tools that can grow with the right nurturing and support.

Dr. Muthee and SGHI have a wonderful story to tell about their work. Although I will not be there is person, my team is committed to contributing to the development of HII, with a firm belief that the timing has never been better to encourage innovation.