This is a guest post written by Courtney Johnson who is supporting the East African Community with their Open Health Initiative through the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Open Health Initiative
In November 2012, the Heads of State of the East African Community (EAC) Partner States approved the implementation of the Open Health Initiative (OHI) to leverage the collective market size of experience and knowledge of the five countries to reach their goals for women’s and children’s health. The objectives of the OHI are to promote innovative interventions, enhance access to data and information for better results, and provide stronger oversight of results and resources for women’s and children’s health within the EAC through three thematic areas: Accountability for Results and Resources, Results-Based Financing, and Innovation for Improved Health Outcomes.
Innovation is defined broadly in the OHI as the use of technologies or approaches that can help accelerate the achievement of a result, make more efficient use of limited staff time and resources, or support interventions made possible with new tools and technologies. mHealth is therefore a key component. Currently in the region, technological innovations are seldom widespread, often small scale, and not coordinated or integrated within the broader health system. The lack of scale and evidence for projects often leads to inefficiencies and duplications of successful- and unsuccessful- pilots. By addressing innovation as a regional theme, the OHI can leverage successes and accelerate scale-up, with a focus on technological innovations such as mHealth.
A Regional Approach
mHealth has enormous potential to make an impact on reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH), but will require strong coordinating and knowledge sharing mechanisms to reach its full potential. While the five Partner States are at dramatically different stages of development within the technology space, East Africa has one of the largest concentrations of mHealth pilots and programs in the developing world, which both stresses the incredible opportunity the region has to be a leader in this area, as well as the importance of sharing information across the region to avoid repetitive programs that do not make it beyond the pilot stage.
During the development of the OHI, the EAC hosted a regional ICT conference with representatives from e-health to share experience, evidence, and strategic plans. Following this collaboration of experts within Ministries of Health, the OHI developed a formalized mechanism to encourage knowledge sharing. The OHI will be supporting Technical Exchanges of ministry officials to learn through hands-on experience how a neighboring country is successfully addressing aspects of women’s and children’s health and creating a strong foundation for mHealth activities. These exchanges will be one ministry to another when there is an identified need, thereby reducing the duplication of efforts. With leadership coming from the highest levels of government and a huge amount of success coming from experts in the field, this approach will help encourage a decrease in pilots and an increase in adaptation and scale-up of successful innovations across borders.
With implementation beginning this year, the OHI will empower government experts to share best practices- not to stifle innovation but to encourage efficiency- and empower ministry officials to utilize data and evidence to identify where the greatest need for mHealth programs exist thereby maximizing the ability to reach and aid as many people as possible.