Huawei eyes health sector amid county digitalization
Huawei Technologies has singled out the local health sector for its Digital Hospital, a new raft of systems designed to support the county digitalization programs.
One of the key issues identified in healthcare is the use of technology to address human resourcing challenges and the new systems will be used to boost telemedicine. Huawei’s fully connected healthcare solutions will provide medical professionals and organizations with the collaborative infrastructure they need to securely share, process, and use healthcare data, to deliver more effective care for their patients.
This said, Steve Kamuya, Director of Huawei Kenya’s Enterprise Business, includes the company’s advanced, people-oriented medical services solutions such as telemedicine applications to enable remote HD video, teleconsultation, remote surgical demonstrations, medical video-on-demand, and remote doctors’ visits.
“Often counties struggle with insufficient specialist staff, and therefore the systems we have introduced will enable them provide initial guidance, and follow-up care, and even sometimes actual diagnosis or recommendations for treatment through an online video meeting with the patient and the local healthcare worker, particularly if the local test results can be done and shared online as well,” said Kamuya.
Speaking during the Connected Kenya Summit, he noted that there are several examples where digitizing a hospital’s operations improves its operational efficiency, reduces revenue leakages, and significantly enhances patient services.
“Nowadays if we have good historical data of when patients get sick, including the medicines they use, and its frequency, we can predict their future needs and plan accordingly with staffing. Indeed, with Digital Hospital, we can even combine other forms of data, such as climate information that can affect certain infectious diseases or food price data which can lead to malnutrition, and act accordingly to mitigate such issues,” he noted.
Kamunya stated that the Digital Hospital solution is capable of synchronizing county and national government information to make the implementation of devolution more efficient, transparent, and effective. He outlined the example of a successful pilot that the firm has been running between Kenyatta National Hospital, Isiolo’s Teaching and Referral Hospital and a Sub-County Hospital in Garbatula.
“Our experience has shown the importance of a good internet connection, high quality picture quality, and a flexible platform for integrating with different sources of medical information and data,” said Kamunya.
This is the importance of county alignment and close collaboration with the national government in implementation of Kenya’s Digital Superhighway that is expected to enhance connectivity to the County institutions, provide public Wi-Fi and set-up Digital Innovation Hubs.
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