How SNA can help improve the diagnostic accuracy of health workers in understaffed areas of Nigeria by using a collaborative platform to access expertise from various sources: physicians, online resources.

Problem statement

How SNA can help improve the diagnostic accuracy of health workers in understaffed areas of Nigeria by using a collaborative platform to access expertise from various sources: physicians, online resources.

Background 

Nigeria is a country of 170 million people, 70% of whom live in rural areas. We have only one physician per 2500 people, which is six times fewer physicians per capita than the United States, and most of our senior physicians practice in large, urban, tertiary care centers. Physicians deployed to these rural areas by the government after a year of internship provide primary care for these100 million people in these rural areas.   They are assisted by community health with limited medical training.

Without adequate physician guidance, community health workers inappropriately treated many of these patients, and several hundred lives were lost. Often times, community health workers as well as junior physicians communicated via social media platform (Whatsapp, Facebook) that limit users to only their circle of friends, and nobody at higher levels of expertise.

The solution is MedicFriend, a mobile-based platform that connects young primary care workers with those that have more treatment experience.

I am working on this solution in collaboration with a friend, medical doctor from Nigeria and also MBA student at Hult ( Ebuwa Igho-osagie). 

The app will also provide access to medical protocols applicable to rural, resource-constrained settings and will have Integrated Messaging capabilities making this communication instantaneous and effective.  These features will increase diagnostic accuracy and improve health outcomes.

Usage data from our application is highly desirable to public health organizations. 

How SNA will be helpful for our project?

We conducted some interviews in order to discover how the medical doctors and community heath workers are currently working and whom are they interacting the most.

We found out that:

·      Community health workers and junior physicians communicated via whatsapp or facebook. They are communicated primarily to their medical class mates, because they are sharing the same area of interest  (pediatric, surgery etc..)

·      When they need more help for a difficult diagnostic, they are contacting senior doctors, if they have direct contact in their networks to ask for advice

By attending the SNA classes, I realized that we could develop a better application if we understand well the existing networks of the medical precisians in Nigeria and healthcare institution in place (WHO, Government, Pharmaceuticals companies etc…).  

This project is broad and challenging, below one of the few selected areas I will focus in this blog:

1. Understand how the network of medical care patricians is organize in Nigeria and identify the main groups and subgroups and how they are interacting to each other.

a.      How : By gathering the information through a series of survey and interview s that will include important attributes for the analysis. For example: in addition to the classical information like gender, marital status and so on, Medical specialties, location, medical school they attend, year of graduation, area where they are located, areas where they did they practice after their internship, how often they are collaborating with their peers? ….

2. Understand how the Physicians are interacting within the health institution in place (medical university, government, international institution like WHO, pharmaceutical companies) and how often?  Are there any formal communication ways to communicate with the ministry of health? How did the doctor maintain their knowledge: through their previous university or association or international institutions?

Outcomes

By using a Social Network analysis of the data (Visual and quantitative analysis )we will gather, we are hoping:

1.  Understand better the current networks and build ups our application in such a way that it will improve the current networks based on they analysis of how it is currently organized.
2. Identify the important people in the network or place where the relationship is built. This will help us approach the right people for our solution that will help to spread the use of our application within the community.
3. Identify how the institution in place share the important healthcare information to the medical team and how we can also improve this through our apps
4. Understand how the WHO interact within the medical people locally and what information there are looking for, therefore build up our apps in the what that will help to collect useful data and understand for example the spread and frequency of epidemic disease like cholera end even predict them in the future.

Conclusion

 SNA is a powerful tool. We understood that it would help us to have a bright new way of developing our project MedicFriend.

We started to develop the project based on basic data collected and build up assumptions. But now, SNA capabilities will help us to have a deeper understanding about the relationship built by physicians and community’s health workers in the medical environment. We have to also consider the political environment and see how we will integrate the system in place. And more importantly, we wanted to collect healthcare data and share it with important institution in place, we will be able after our research to technically build our apps in order to collect the important information that institution favored to analyze the Nigeria healthcare system.

We had already present the idea to different people and also participated in MIT hack medicine where we gain a lot of positive response. By using my technical expertise in IT and my 6 years background in Medical Devices Company in addition to the healthcare background my teammate. Furthermore, by integrating now SNA in the project development process, we are hoping to be able develop the best solution possible that will have an impact on all the healthcare system in Africa.

Diane ESMEL

MBA Candidate 2015

Hult International Business