Teleheath access for remote communities in developing countries - feasibility study

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Half the world's population cannot obtain essential health services (WHO, 2019), and to access even basic healthcare in remote communities of sub-Saharan Africa requires a walk of hours, even days (The Lancet, 2020). Earlier this year, STI4D was able to innovate and test technology to allow communities to hold remote consultations with their medical advisors using simple diagnostic technology and video calling in Tanzania. Feedback from patients and medical professionals was extremely positive in terms of both health, time and financial impacts.We now want to build international research and innovation partnerships and networks in additional countries to demonstrate the wider viability, acceptance and impact of this solution, as well as to be able to prepare for tailoring and testing the approach in markets other than Tanzania. This will not only give us an improved product/service, but also allow us to commercialise and scale our tele-health system more rapidly and effectively.In this project, our work will focus on Uganda (a neighbouring country in East Africa which shares many cultural and infrastructural similarities to Tanzania, and will allow us to demonstrate how easily the system can be adapted to similar markets) and in Nepal (a country in Asia which - while it shares many of the challenges of community remoteness - has a significant diversity to East Africa in many other aspects, and will therefore allow us to see how generally applicable our system can be). We will aim to build future research and innovation partnerships and networks with local stakeholders and potential partners, and carry out community engagement and surveys with potential end users, to inform and enable a subsequent process of in-country collaborative R&D and system testing.This will give us the necessary partnerships, outcomes and data to be able to more successfully and rapidly commercialise and scale our innovative approach to increase rural access to healthcare in the developing world.