Innovative data helping Africa to improve primary healthcare delivery

According to the World Health Organisation, primary healthcare involves allowing people at communities at the low level to understand health challenges that are difficult to achieving health-related Sustainable Development Goals.

Application of innovative data is also helping four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to improve primary healthcare delivery.

“There is a lot of fragmentation in health information systems in most countries and taking into consideration that individual innovations are coordinated into larger systems is difficult to bring them to scale and sustain them,” says Allyson English, senior programme associate at Research for Development.

The report on Ghana, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Argentina in Latin America shows that these countries important data collection, analysis, circulation and use to strengthen primary healthcare.

The report which was launched by the Primary Health Care Performance Initiative at a panel event in the United States in December 2018 shows that using local, regional, and national-level data for priority setting can consider that policies are able to be maintained at certain level and scalable while remaining applicable at the community level.

A co-author of the report and programme director at Research for Development, Laurel Hatt, stated, “Interconnected data systems provide a comprehensive view of health system performance and can help consider that care is available when and where patients need it.”

It has been reported that a data system in Rwanda allows individuals to use mobile phones to receive care from a network of nurses and physicians.