By Paul Crook
“It is apparent ‘last mile’ is granting the wrong impression since it is not just the physical infrastructure blocking access to quality health care”
Outreach has been tried, but the real shift was facilitated by digital engagement. A number of Global actors have sought to take digitalization as their own thinking, but the means are wholly driven by the private sector. The reduction in cost for the hardware and the almost exponential growth in quality coverage for mobile telephony networks has sponsored fresh thinking. Fresh thinking, regularly sponsored by the capability to turn a penny, and earn a living, as markets have not just changed but been created.
Digitalization has allowed cost–effective delivery of a multitude of services. Digitalization has offered the opportunity to liberate people from the barriers of geography, cause fresh thinking on the lack of investment in people and structures offering a comprehensive approach to health and challenge the hegemony on poor supply of health provision.
Digitisation is best known for cash-based programming and how mobile money has taken on fresh dynamics, for good and for bad, across East Africa where cash distributions are being confused with the development of proper social protection. This is where the elements of health provision come forward. Digital health is not going to offer open heart surgery but what it does do is change the dynamics along the continuum of promotive and preventive working where people can take responsibility for themselves or skill up to address the preventable.
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