Page 27 - Demo Faces

2-day journey away. Third, ADB clearly needed to manage expectations: they were building a t-for-purpose rural health center, not a state-of-the-art hospital, and it was going to sta ed by a nurse and health extension o cers.
As exciting as it was to see the beginning of a new health center for a community that needed it, Mikkelsen-Lopez also knew it wasn’t ever going to be enough, and her vision for this community, and many others like it in Papua New Guinea, was far more expansive than a bricks- and-mortar clinic.
“We know health infrastructure alone
is not su cient to improve health outcomes in PNG. We need to think about how people experience the health sector there and better understand their needs so we can deliver services t for purpose. We need to reimagine it and think how we can use digital technology to bridge that gap in these rural remote settings,” she explains.
In places where there is only a patchy phone network and the only reliable form of telecommunication is by radio, xing that bottleneck might just be one of the most important health interventions
of all, because it opens the door to telemedicine.
“Imagine a future where nurses in these rural health centers can communicate with their peers in hospitals through telemedicine to better deliver services,” says Mikkelsen-Lopez. “Or imagine using drones to bring in medicines or bring back samples to the laboratory for testing. Imagine using personalized diagnostic kits, so that people can
diagnose themselves in the privacy of their own homes and then use mobile phone technology to communicate with healthcare workers on a treatment plan.”
These ideas are not far-fetched. Such innovations are already in use in other countries, and health technology is already being used in innovative ways
in Papua New Guinea. Since 2012, ADB has invested in a digital public health information pilot, which is now being rolled out across Papua New Guinea. The system tracks service delivery in rural settings, providing real-time information about what services are being provided, and it also tracks disease outbreaks.
Technology needs to be sustainable
and acceptable and, most of all, needs
to improve the patients’ healthcare experiences. The key to getting that right? Start with the communities, says Mikkelsen-Lopez. “We talked with the communities, we brought them examples of the some of the innovations that we were considering, so they could see them, feel them, know how they worked.
“Health is everybody’s business. My
aim at ADB is to ensure that we are continuously pushing ourselves and striving to deliver projects that best meet the needs of the populations today and in the future,” she says.
Watch Inez Mikkelsen-Lopez’ talk at the 2020 ADB Innovation Fair
Trailer / Full talk
Find out more: Papua New Guinea: Rural Primary Health Services Delivery Project https://www.adb.org/projects/41509-013/ main
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