(just between you & me)
How can African healthcare systems save more lives in the most efficient way possible?
Solutions that target symptoms of the problem instead of seeking to find the fundamental elements that make the problem exist become anomalies. We wonder why continuing to 'solve' our problems with these high-level approaches doesn't lead to sustained impact. Efosa Ojomo calls out this flawed reasoning in his book, 'The Prosperity Paradox'. These anomalies exist because the solutions that created them only address symptoms of the problem.
With 1.4 Billion people living on the continent today, the need for scalable, efficient healthcare systems is fundamental and urgent.
Healthcare facilities on the continent today offer only the physical platforms for the effective service provision of healthcare to be done. Good healthcare systems need to take own a life of their own; relying on but not tethered to the humans who are a component within them. Robust systems; both technical and human-intensive, still need to be built on top of these physical platforms to make them something more. The hybrid of technical systems & human infrastructure that makes refined, human best-practices replicable across African geographies is the final step in the healthcare service provision chain. Discrete hospital ecosystems needs to be connected by robust technical platforms that codify processes that are effectively executed in some medical environments while being ineffective everywhere else. In this way, replicating successes contextually while correcting for error in new hospital environments is a function of what technical frameworks the healthcare system implements; so that the best ideas for what works don't need to be rediscovered from scratch in every new location.
The hybrid of technical systems & human infrastructure that makes refined, human best-practices replicable across African geographies is the final step in the healthcare service provision chain.
Robust healthcare platforms that are a hybrid of human and technical efficiency need data. However, data is deeply fragmented in our hospitals today, where the 50,000TB of data produced annually by hospitals worldwide is stuck in physical record rooms in a form that cannot be made useful to whatever technical systems that could be built. Building this hybrid heathcare platforms on the current legacy systems of data management is therefore doomed to become a solution anomaly that does not live up to its potential from the outset. Fragmented, physical data systems in legacy healthcare bottleneck the effectiveness of whatever technical system that could be built on them.
Vectorgram's answer to this fragmentation is large scale digitization.
50,000,000 Gigabytes of Medical Data produced annually by hospitals
Medical records interface with the real world on paper, but it doesn't have to stop there. Vectorgram Archive's document digitization pipeline will see physical documents get scanned, uploaded and indexed into a scalable, secure and reliably accessible repository of information that will provide specific data to medical workflows universally. Archive codifies the medical best practice of backing up records in their digital forms into a robust, paperless digitization system that will enable any hospital anywhere in the world to leverage their share of the 50,000TB to save patients' lives faster armed with the right information. Archive's specific data is contextual: availing data from every process in the medical lifecyle; from consultations, to prescriptions, diagnoses, lab reports, medical scans and surgeries too.
The good news is, Archive will only be the beginning. The emergent technical synergies that are made possible by Archive enable the creation of entire infrastructures of higher-order solutions that cut across all the nerve endings of the healthcare system: Electronic Medical Records, Diagnostics, Medical Insurance, Referral Scheduling, Medical Logistics, Medical Finance & Low-level Process Automation.
Vectorgram's masterplan for the healthcare ecosystem in Africa is to democratize access to this robust data management architecture. The technical innovations that well connected information processing pipelines will unlock will form the underpinnings of Africa's next 'leap' in conventional development lifecycles; synonymous, perhaps, to how early mobile money adoption spurred the coming of age of African Digital Finance ecosystems 'overnight'.
Vectorgram will drive the large-scale digitization of medical data with Archive to create robust, reliable data management infrastructure on Sequence, our Electronic Medical Records platform. Archive and Sequence will then create the dynamic data and systematic reach to enable specific solutions from Diagnostics to Low-level Process Automation.
This is Vectorgram's secret to beat the healthcare solution anomaly; just between you and me.