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KATHERINE CHOU: Hi.
I'm Katherine Chou, director of research
and innovations at Google.
Mobile devices are essential to delivering data-driven health
care, particularly in Low- and Middle-Income Countries,
or LMICs for short.
Today, I'd like to share with you our work with the WHO
and mobile developers to build an SDK,
or a Software Development Kit, that makes it easier
to develop data-driven apps for community health workers.
Community health workers often form the bedrock of health care
in LMICs, where about half of the population
lacks access to vital health care resources.
These front-line workers who are embedded in the communities
are the cornerstone to connecting patients
with essential care.
They take on jobs ranging from maternal and child health care
to malaria prevention, to helping families
access health information.
Over the past few years, smartphones and mobile apps
have become invaluable care tools
for community health workers.
They support community outreach and home health services,
including triaging patients by accessing immunization and care
records, conducting health screenings,
and distributing medications.
Today, community health workers have these services
at their fingertips, helping them
deliver accurate and timely evidence-based care.
These efforts aim to improve health outcomes at a population
level across these countries.
With these services come a new set of challenges.
Often, community health workers will
have multiple apps or even phones
to manage the same patient across different disease
or outreach programs.
Incompatible data and lack of interoperability
leads to situations where decisions for patients
are made with incomplete information.
We're applying technology to help accelerate a paradigm
shift where it's easier to develop health care apps that
are seamlessly interoperable.
By open sourcing and supporting tools
that ensure the exchange of high-quality data,
developers can focus resources on designing applications
to meet the needs of their local communities
without having to worry about managing clinical content
and data requirements for evidence-based care.
To advance this mission, we're collaborating
with the WHO and an ecosystem of tech providers
to create an open source SDK.
This SDK will help developers build secure mobile solutions
using a patient-centered global data standard called
FHIR, also known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources.
This in turn makes it easier for health workers
to deliver data-driven care.
With over 3 billion active Android devices globally,
there's an opportunity to support a huge number of health
workers and their patients.
Some health workers often need to deliver care
in areas with unreliable connectivity.
We've designed the SDK to allow Android apps to run offline
with no connectivity by storing and processing data locally.
The FHIR SDK is part of our mission
to democratize access to high-quality care
through mobile devices.
Let me introduce a key partner in this work, Dr. Garrett Mehl,
head of digital health and innovation unit at the World
Health Organization.
Thank you, Garrett, for joining us.
Can you share a little more about the WHO's vision
and how developers are using the SDK?
GARRETT MEHL: Hi.
Thanks so much for having me.
I'm happy to share what we're doing at WHO to make
things easier for developers.
We want to bring evidence-based care to health care workers
everywhere.
First, we're helping our member states with care guidelines.
These guidelines consist of life-saving interventions.
Our approach applies to those already investing
in digital transformation.
Guidelines are designed to capture rigorously tested
and adapted clinical and public health recommendations.
Our goal is to provide an easier way
to adopt high-quality, evidence-based care guidelines
into digital systems.
Now translation, we know, has been a challenge.
We need an accurate translation of narrative guideline
recommendations into executable digital systems.
And it's difficult. It's both resource-intensive and prone
to mistakes.
We have focused on updating guidelines for the digital era.
We call these digitalized guidelines SMART,
because they're Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive,
Requirements-based, and Testable.
So we've embraced open standards, like FHIR,
to support interoperability across patient-centered health
care applications and SQL for consistency
in calculating decision support and indicators.
It isn't yet easy to build software
that can make use of digitized SMART guidelines.
So to solve this, we've engaged the community
and collaborated with Google on developing the FHIR Software
Development Kit.
We think this will make it easier to bootstrap health care
applications with SMART guidelines,
offline capabilities, and mobile-first functionality.
Take for example, WHO's EmCare project.
This is a project that's leveraging the FHIR
SDK to develop a reference software platform.
It's focused on health care for children in emergency settings.
So when we combine SMART guidelines and the SDK,
we enable technologists to accurately integrate
evidence-based content and allow that interoperability.
This is an open source and open standards approach
that will ensure every country's digital transformation has
access and can leverage the latest care
recommendations to deliver essential interventions to all.
KATHERINE CHOU: Thank you, Garrett,
for the insights into where we're headed.
In addition to partnering with the WHO
on accelerating the development of next-generation mobile-first
tools for data-driven health care,
we'd like to share some examples of other innovative tech
collaborators who are currently doing amazing work using
the FHIR SDK to help community health workers better connect
with their patients.
One example is Ona, a team working in Liberia
building a FHIR-native health app
for front-line workers doing health and humanitarian relief
efforts.
IPRD Solutions is a health care technology group
that we partner with to enable health innovations.
This partnership helped over 2,000 community health workers
allocate malaria prevention nets to more than 700,000 people
in Nigeria.
And finally, Lattice Innovations,
a health tech solutions company based in India,
is joining the State of Tamil Nadu's Population Health
Registry Consortium.
They're building a community-led health screening
and primary care mobile application
that will help fulfill the state's vision
to provide data-driven health care for all.
We look forward to engaging with these and other regional app
developers in our mission to empower community health
workers and enable equitable access to high-quality care.
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