Dispatch From South Africa

My blog readers must think I ' ve abandoned them over the past few weeks.  I apologize for the whirlwind of October and November.  With the BIDMC-Lahey merger planning and the new cloud hosted Meditech go lives of my day job, plus the usual Fall conference commitments, and my new work with the Gates Foundation, blogging has fallen behind.The Gates Foundation has a bold plan for Africa - unifying the health records of the continent using biometrics, simple phone apps, and a highly resilient low bandwidth cloud that includes data integrity components based on blockchain.Here ' s the use case - patients with HIV are medicated and then monitored for viral suppression using Viral Load lab tests drawn 6 months after therapy begins.  This process requires accurate patient matching between clinic visits, which might occur at different locations and with different care providers.In the US, exact matching of demographics works about 60% of the time.  Probabilistic models work about 80% of the time.  South Africa has a similar experience. The end result is that many lab tests are redundant and wasteful.  Measuring outcomes is challenging.  Closing the loop for followup may be impossible.  Biometrics can improve matching to 99%, improving quality, safety and efficiency.South Africa has a " 90/90/90 " national strategy - 90% of HIV positive patients should know they are HIV positive.  90% of those should be on anti-retr...
Source: Life as a Healthcare CIO - Category: Information Technology Source Type: blogs