Large-scale diseases in both communicable and non-communicable categories require immense costs, effort, and resources in the entire lifecycle of disease management at local, regional, and national levels in Sub Saharan Africa. This burden has hampered the effective prevention and control of communicable diseases such as Hepatitis B and the essential goal of raising awareness and early detections in non-communicable diseases such as Breast Cancer. The purpose of this study is to understand the role of digital technologies in resolving some of the significant current barriers in information such as disease prevalence and medical intelligence (Kahn, Fleischauer, Casani & Groseclose, 2010) that have been responsible for the lack of progress in the disease management of large scale diseases. A qualitative case-study and descriptive phenomenological approach have been chosen to achieve this purpose. The study focused on Ghana for its research inputs in communicable diseases such as Hepatitis B and Kenya for non-communicable diseases such as Breast Cancer. The choice of these countries was based upon the available access to the hospitals and HCP’s. Major hospitals in these two countries have healthcare programs planned that are of interest to this research, and the HCP’s are known through cohorts.
Further, the aspect of communication as the medium of communication is English in both these countries. Over 19 healthcare professionals, biostatisticians from Ghana and Kenya contributed to this study via interviews and group discussions. They described their experiences with a specific focus on the role of digital technologies or the lack of it, in managing the large scale disease burden in Sub Saharan Africa region. This research has put forward a recommendation on potential framework in the conclusions and recommendation section that includes the whole ecosystem of stakeholders that are required to extracting disease data digitally along with geocoding, curating it to fetch the attributes that derive medical intelligence (Kahn, Fleischauer, Casani & Groseclose, 2010) for actionable strategies, digital development of disease prevalence for local, regional and national levels and digital data management of the progress the patients make from awareness to screening or diagnosis leading to efficient and effective treatment options.
Key words: Disease prevalence, Geocoding, Medical Intelligence, Communicable diseases, Non-communicable diseases, NCDs, Digital Healthcare technologies, Disease management, Ghana, Kenya, Sub Saharan Africa, SSA, Covid-19.
Dr. Emmanuel Benjamin
Research on Using Geolocation to Manage High Prevalence Diseases
Additional info
In a recent research effort to evaluate medical resource utilization and timeliness of access to treatments for breast cancer at tertiary centers in sub-Saharan Africa, Dr. Emmanuel Benjamin and a team of medical researchers found that patients with breast cancer treated in tertiary facilities in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to timely diagnosis and modern systemic therapies. Most patients in Ghana and Nigeria bore the full cost of their healthcare and were more likely to be employed and have secondary or postsecondary education. Access to screening, diagnosis and appropriate care, is likely to be substantively lower for the general population.
To read this valuable research refer to Real-world challenges for patients with breast cancer in sub-Saharan Africa: a retrospective observational study of access to care in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria, which can be downloaded on this Link.
As part of the study, a link is provided to BCPJ Geocoding consisting of a map of Ghana and Nigeria that plots Distances Traveled by Cancer Patients for Treatment in Ghana and Nigeria. To see the results of the geocoding, follow this Link.