The Helium Health Data Network

Helium Health is building digital infrastructure to power healthcare in Africa and securely aggregating anonymized health data from diverse sources.

Adegoke Olubusi, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder

A myriad of challenges facing healthcare in Africa - 400 million people with little to no access to health services, poor life expectancy, high child and maternal mortality - can be solved when robust healthcare data is collected and data-driven solutions are developed. Unfortunately, healthcare data in Africa is fragmented and trapped in paper.

Despite the encouraging prevalence of community health worker (CHW) applications in countries like Kenya, the growing adoption of open-source electronic medical records (EMR) solutions, and the implementation of National Health Management Information Systems (e.g., DHIS2) in countries like Kenya and Nigeria, the utilization of data is still limited. Health information systems used by secondary and tertiary hospitals remain siloed from each other and CHW apps, truncating longitudinal patient information that could enhance clinical assessment. Data from private health facilities, which serve 60% of Nigeria’s population, make up less than 10% of the data collected by DHIS2.

Therefore, at any given time, significant swarths of data are missing from our understanding of healthcare on the continent. These reporting gaps impede the thorough analysis and use of data and exclude a significant portion of the population from government and donor-funded efforts to improve health outcomes.

Accurate information is the foundation of sound healthcare decisions at every level. Data collected at points of care are critical components of this foundation. In addition to supplying health workers with comprehensive patient profiles that aid in clinical assessment, when aggregated, healthcare data can facilitate effective resource allocation, support public health monitoring and disease surveillance, and unlock health financing options. Therefore, our target audience includes health workers, health administrators, healthcare policymakers, funders, researchers, and patients themselves.

We support health workers by providing comprehensive patient medical histories for improved diagnosis. In addition to richer individual patient data, through the HH Data Network, we can leverage the power of big data (aggregated patient data) and develop clinical decision support tools to enhance their work.

Our solution scales epidemiological data to inform decision-making at state, national and regional levels. Use cases include identifying the leading causes of child and maternal mortality, transmitting early warnings of epidemics, identifying high-risk communities for preventative interventions, and measuring the impact of these interventions.

Researchers can also leverage patient longitudinal data in the HH Data Network to improve Africa’s underrepresentation in global drug development by identifying underserved pharmaceutical needs and recruiting clinical trial candidates.

The Helium Health Data Network will make data available for non-profit-related research for academics. For example, we are already part of a pioneering research program (as described in the answer to question 11) that utilizes real-world health data from sub-Saharan Africa. One of the anticipated outputs of this research program is an academic paper or series of papers that serve as an open resource for the African research community and the global research community in general. With these papers, we hope to provide a rich framework to understand population disease risk prediction, the utility of digital health systems to enable health and care, and a platform to inform preventative and interventional strategies for managing disease across the region.

Studies such as this literature review by Singh et al. (2018) identifies how healthcare data collected from EMRs can be used. Therefore, it is precedent that shows that the Helium Data Network can equip all healthcare stakeholders across Africa data and reach for research, resource allocation, smart policy creation, precision public health, market-entry, and other activities.

The HH Data Network can produce invaluable data to inform health care decisions and national and regional health care planning. Governments can receive routine data collection flows for enhanced disease surveillance and enable accurate service evaluation and benchmarking of healthcare providers. Furthermore, it can set priorities and create evidence-based health policies, strategies, and long-term resource allocation plans that strengthen health systems and scale healthcare solutions to reach millions.

Researchers can leverage the longitudinal patient data in the Helium Data Network to improve Africa's underrepresentation in global drug development. They can use our solution to identify the largest pharmaceutical needs within the most underserved populations, accelerate the R&D of transformational drug and diagnostic discoveries that address neglected diseases, track the drug effectiveness, safety, and resistance peculiarities specific to the region, and recruit patients for clinical trials.

A critical strategy for scaling the impact of our solution is through our ever-growing EMR/HMIS solution on which it is built. The Helium Health Data Network currently collects millions of data points on over 300,000 patient visits each month seen in 470+ health facilities across 6 African countries. 

From 2019 to 2020, the number of patient visits captured by our EMR/HMIS solution, and thus included in our data network, grew by 76%. This number and the data collected are poised to grow by more magnitudes in 2021 as we expand our EMR/HMIS' reach into East Africa, Francophone West Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa. 

Another critical channel through which we plan to scale our impact is through integrations with other applications that collect data at the point of care, such as community health worker (CHW) apps. For instance, we have begun integration conversations with MedtronicLABS, a community health program and application that focuses on chronic disease management (heart disease, diabetes). With this integration, we can improve referrals by facilitating the easy transfer of community health data to other levels of care, and have more robust granular patient data included in our solution, impacting 100,000+ more patients each year.

We will measure our success against:

• The number of external healthcare data solutions we integrate with and the number of patient referrals we are able to enhance. We are already in conversations with several community health worker apps such as MedtronicLABS and Medic Mobile about integrations
• The number of researchers and collaborators that are able to use our data
• The number of academic papers published by these researchers and collaborators
• The number of citations we receive in the creation of policies and white papers
• The number of health workers that use our Clinical Decision Support tools
• The number of patients our clinical decision support tools is used for

Government regulation is one of the barriers that may limit our impact. Healthcare regulation in most African countries has not caught up with digital innovations. Thus, there is a chance that regulations created by governments may disregard the current realities and create regulations that hinder the scaling of digital innovations like ours. We will overcome the possible barrier that government regulation poses by being compliant with local and international healthcare and data regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and NDPR. In addition to this, by being the leading healthcare technology provider in our region, we are in a unique position to shape these policies and laws. We are in several high-level forums, such as the World Health Organization’s Health Data Collaborative. At the national level in Nigeria, we are members of the Health Policy Commission of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG). At the state level, we are on the steering committee of the Lagos State Government’s e-health strategy and are helping shape the future of digital health in Africa’s most populous city.

Another possible barrier is the entrance of a larger, better-funded player. However, our local context, first-mover advantage, and long-term vision will help us overcome this threat.

IFC TechEmerge

Hub71

Y Combinator

Google Launchpad

Imperial College, UK

We are applying to the Trinity Challenge for funding to accelerate the development and use our data solution, and to meet partners and mentors that can help us ethically scale our solution for the global good.

We would like to partner with:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because are the leading funders of global health and will have instances where our solution can be deployed to improve their programs.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to help us strengthen our framework for measuring the impact of our solutions on health outcomes, and to publish studies using our data.