Telemedicine | How do we reach the 3 + Billion people without access to health services?
ClickMedix is making a digital impact on easier access to medical care, no matter where in the world you may be.
THE PROBLEM
Healthcare is a commodity and a right that 7.7 billion people (otherwise known as the entire population of the world) require. It is a universal need. And in that vein, it is also a universal issue. Globally, they estimate that as many as 5 billion people are without access to safe and affordable surgical care. The three biggest factors where we face challenges in healthcare today are: access to care, cost of care and finally, the shortage in providers of care. There are no areas in the world that are free from these three challenging circumstances.
In the African region they hold more than 22% of the global burden of disease, but have access to only 3% of health workers, and less than 1% of the world’s financial resources. And while Africa no doubt faces some of the biggest hurdles, the United States is also no stranger to these healthcare challenges. In the U.S. the shortages of physicians in rural areas are high and increasing rapidly. While approximately 15% of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, only 10% of the nation’s physicians practice in rural areas.
With over 30 million Americans living over an hour from the nearest care center, it is clear that these issues are not limited to low-income countries. Not only do most people have to travel impossibly far distances to reach a care provider, when they arrive there may be no one available to help them for months. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) in total there is a global shortage of approximately 4.3 million physicians, nurses, and other health professionals. And while the shortage is unmitigated in developing nations, because of limited amounts and capacities of medical schools, rural and remote areas struggle with a physician shortage in all corners of the world.
A SOLUTION
At MIT, when Ting Shih looked at this problem with a critical eye, she envisioned a solution. Ting founded Click Diagnostics, a social enterprise born out of the MIT Media Lab, which conducted mobile health projects and pilots in over ten countries. From the success and learning of that three-year pilot, ClickMedix was launched in 2011, initially to screen women for cervical cancer in Botswana. “Everyone needs health care,” Shih explained. “And all around the world, most people have a phone before they even have electricity. So why not use mobile phones to deliver health care?”¹
Today, after much success, ClickMedix is a global mobile health social enterprise in 18 countries, whose main goal is to increase the capacity of physicians and health organizations to be able to serve more patients, with one-click. Through an easy-to-use, one-click interface ClickMedix’s solutions are many: reducing hospital visits by 50–90%, lowering operational costs with mobile trained health coaches, reducing specialists costs through tele-consultation, increasing early detection and treatment planning with expert consultation.
The interface helps ClickMedix achieve these solutions by allowing the patients to participate in remote consultations and get a quick diagnosis. ClickMedix also trains health workers to successfully screen patients and then securely transmit patient data to the needed specialists. The interface guides these workers through a series of questions for their patients, and based on the patient’s responses and images, healthcare workers are able to make provisional diagnoses and recommend treatment or referral to surgical centers. To ensure accuracy, the ClickMedix application also sends the photos and data to surgeons who can confirm the diagnosis and treatment plans.
In their forward momentum, the company can justly flaunt some very successful numbers: they have saved $10+ million USD, trained over 2,000 health professionals and improved the lives of more than 350,000 individuals worldwide. As populations continue to expand, and our life expectancies continue to double, our need for healthcare is only going to increase. At a time when the world needs it most, ClickMedix is spearheading the charge toward drastic improvement in the healthcare industry. One-click at a time, they step into the forefront of the changing medical field, in an attempt to reach the goal of altering the lives of over a billion people.
Written by Adrienne Glenn
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