My assignment with Amref Health Africa's Clinical & Diagnostics (C&D) program

Amref Health Africa was founded in 1957 in Nairobi, Kenya. I’m sure you would have heard about the legacy of the ‘Flying Doctors’. It is an international non-government organization committed to lasting health change in Africa. 

Very few people in Africa have access to quality medical care. Africa is home to about 11 per cent of the world’s population, but has a mere 3 per cent of the world’s health workers tackling 24 per cent of the global disease burden. Amref Health Africa has been working very hard for more than 50 years to bridge this gap.

Our month long Corporate Service Corps engagement was primarily focused on the Clinical & Diagnostics program.

An important technical program area within Amref Health Africa, Clinical & Diagnostics has the goal of strengthening health systems by developing & applying solutions to challenges in diagnostics, medical & surgical services across Africa.

Specialist Outreach Project of Clinical & Diagnostics Program (among other initiatives) carries about 3000 surgical operations and over 10, 000 consultations per year. 

As part of our Corporate Service Corps deployment here in Nairobi, our focus right from the very outset, was on delivering ‘realistic’ and ‘sustainable’ recommendations and solutions.

Our recommendations and solutions for Amref Health Africa could be divided into three broad categories – 

1. Increasing departmental effectiveness w.r.t. Reporting, Program Management, Change Management & Donor Delight (led by Mark Bolter) 
2. Enabling digitization of the data they capture & its submission, efficiently analyzing it and effectively communicating the overall impact (led by myself Suman Mukherjee) 
3. Increasing sustainability of the Outreach initiative with a focus on Capability Transfer (led by Hiromi Kawatsu)

As for the ‘outcomes’, with our interventions and with our focus on ‘realistic’ recommendations and ‘sustainable’ solutions, we look forward to Amref Health Africa managing its programs better, engaging strongly with its institutional donors, digitizing their data capture, using analytics to communicate impact and implementing e-learning techniques to improve capacity building.
These will help Amref Health Africa to stay competitive in its line of work, continue attracting institutional donors to support its execution budget and keep doing amazing work to bridge this health gap in Africa. 

Apart from our recommendations (which will translate into tangibles soon), these are snapshots of few of the tangibles we delivered that they can start using right away after a pilot - 

 
Our assignment was also unique because of the IBM-GSK collaboration. 

This cross-organizational effort between IBM and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) was focused around leveraging the synergies. While the GSK PULSE (GSK's Corporate Citizenship initiative) volunteer Beverley brought her Health-based domain experience on the table, the IBMers lent a technology focus to it. Owing to our pre-deployment discussions and work, we were able to hit the ground running even before we met with our clients – and that was a huge gain given that we only have a month onsite.  Beverley's stint for 6-months at Amref Health Africa C&D will end in Feb-2015. 

She has already started to driving our recommendations towards tangibles and our tangibles towards pilot execution. This collaboration model was a huge success from a 'sustainability of our recommendations' standpoint. 

We were able to accomplish quite a few things in just a month. Right from data collection through interviews & field visits to intense discussions to churn our recommendations (keeping the 'context' and 'constraints' within which they'll be executed in mind), to giving a number of tangibles that could be directly piloted - it has been a great journey. 

I'm mighty proud of our efforts!

Pic1: IBMers with Beverley (from GSK) and Jennifer (from Amref Health Africa C&D)
Pic2: Hiromi and I
Pic3: Mark and I
Pic4: Beverley and I

 

Some other office snapshots: 

The 'Flying Doctors': 
This is how it all started and they are still sought after. These doctors reached the most remote parts to serve the medical needs of impoverished Africans. While the Flying Doctors do medical evacuation presently, the Outreach program still carries out their great work using the Flying Doctors' planes.
We visited the hangar and here are some snapshots - 

Outreach visit to the Tumutumu PCEA Hospital: We wanted to see a remote Outreach and we got this opportunity during the 3rd week of our stay. We wanted to experience first hand how Amref Health Africa mobilizes specialist volunteer doctors to visit such remote places and more importantly, we wanted to do a mini pilot of the paper forms that we digitized. Well, we found out that Tumutumu PCEA Hospital is in pretty good shape - it is a pleasant exception. Most of the other hospitals where the Outreach doctors conduct their consultations and surgeries generally beg for attention. Here are a few moments in time - 

#ibmcsc Kenya