Jamii Data Desk

Healthcare workers in rural, remote, and underserved areas in developing countries are heavily challenged with communication issues. In rural Tanzania, traditional beliefs that define sickness as an unavoidable part of life often prevail over modern medical interventions. With few alternatives, people who live far from health centers often rely on traditional healers to treat their various health issues, but many healers are aware of their limitations.

Traditional healers, traditional birth attendants, and herbalists are best known for their exceptional skills in using medicinal plants to cure illnesses, and people consult them for everything from curing disease to good-luck charms. The rural patients’ clients prefer traditional healers to doctors as they feel some things cannot be treated in the hospital and also, they want extra protection for the body and mind.

Due to limited information in the community and inadequate infrastructure, people became dependent on Traditional healers and traditional birth attendants’ services, including maternal issues. In the past, many people suffered from illness and some lost their lives. 

Traditional healers and traditional birth attendant’s services are overwhelmed by patients who could have been managed at primary facilities. They do not have easy access to refer to or get advice from different primary health care facilities. Also, they are generating income for curing people but sometimes they fail to treat some diseases which need professional medical doctors. People come to primary healthcare facilities in desperation when herbs fail to treat potentially fatal infections like malaria, or when unskilled healers fail to recognize the signals of difficulties during childbirth, and in some instances, it is too late for treatment. 

The primary health facility workers have no access to the communication data with traditional healers and traditional birth attendants and have no way of creating the referrals. As a result, many people rely on past experience and word of mouth to access referral information. This restricts access to healthcare, especially when they need specialized services.

Jamii Data Desk:  This is a digital last-mile remote rural patient-centered platform that uses a simple, replicable, and low-cost mobile technology platform to connect rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants with primary healthcare workers to communicate, make referrals, and organize appointments at the appropriate moment with the correct information so that the right action is taken for the rural patients in order to improve the quality and performance of primary healthcare services.

By connecting connect rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants efficiently with primary health facility workers to provide a network of care for the patient in low resource settings areas.

We provide primary health facility health workers with the data report from rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants such as referral patterns and their response times. This helps primary health facility health workers to use the data reports to explore the pattern for performance and quality improvement. We coordinate care and strengthen data sharing between rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants and primary health facility health workers services. This accelerates the referral and treatment of patients.  Primary health workers can optimize their time receiving referrals from traditional healers, traditional birth attendants, and herbalists in a structured manner, while health workers can use the referral and communication data to inform strategic decision-making. Giving traditional healers, traditional birth attendants, and health workers a digital connection to facilitate referrals capacitates the health service from service delivery at ground level to strategic planning.  Increased access to primary healthcare workers benefits patients in rural areas where medical facilities are limited to traditional healers and traditional birth attendants.

After connecting primary healthcare workers with local healers, we learned that after patients heard healers share information about malaria prevention and treatment, the community started to take malaria more seriously. More people even went to their local clinic after the recommendation of their healers. There’s nothing wrong with seeking a natural alternative. But there will be times when medical attention is necessary. By working with the health pillars of the community

We will adapt an organizational learning tool to enable primary health facility health workers to draw on their experiences, improve their traditional healers and traditional birth attendants' partner interactions, and enhance their overall performance. Primary healthcare facilities are primarily evaluated in terms of Quality delivery and performance outcomes. However, these PHC facilities can interact with many different partners (traditional healers and traditional birth attendants), and there is an untapped opportunity to improve their performance by learning about how their designs and approaches affect each other. 

1. Patient: When a patient attends rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants, they start to build their referral networks and expand the integration of their services into existing primary health services.

2. Rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants: Having easy access to Health workers' advice or coordinating services means that they learn every time a case is discussed on the secure platform. They feel supported and will be able to help more patients. 

3. Health workers: Being able to coordinate care helps more patients get managed at their first visit and helps to ensure that the patients most in need are prioritized for journeys to primary healthcare services. 

4. Health Supervisors: They receive the data especially important in areas that were marginalized. Data results in data-driven decision-making during budget and human resource allocations. 

5. Awareness of diseases in the health system: The data reports contain information on specific diseases, how to make a diagnosis, and how to start to manage patients.

We are passionate about primary healthcare facilities. We break down barriers between formal and informal healthcare for primary healthcare performance. All of us have either experienced the need of being a patient in the traditional healers and traditional birth attendants and have a relative who is dependent on the traditional healers and traditional birth attendants, or has experience in alternative medicine.

We aim to improve the lives of last mile health system users, and health workers, and to better care for their patients. The traditional healers and traditional birth attendants will communicate with the health workers in primary health facilities to ensure they get data that can drive decision-making.  We engage and educate traditional healers and anticipate identifying suspected cases of diseases.

We have developers and primary health practitioners, who are all experts in their field of work and understand what it means to develop impactful solutions.  Our product teams spend hours learning from traditional healers and traditional birth attendants to build a solution for them. Unlike existing solutions, we work in partnership with health workers, traditional healers, and traditional birth attendants as co-designers and co-evaluators of the interventions they implement themselves. 

We believe MIT Solve will help us achieve our goal faster. To achieve this goal, we seek guidance, connections and resources across:

1. Team growth for scale-up:  We acknowledge that we will need to grow our technology team to reach more rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants. We seek guidance in team-building and team-growth practices around hiring (what roles, what experience level), onboarding, employee happiness and retention.

2. Product Branding: As we expand to newer geographies, we seek mentorship in understanding the positioning of our solution in the most tools for inclusion and accessibility; and enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of our rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendant’s referrals.

3. Strategic Partnerships: We seek support in understanding the key strategic partnerships that we should have to help us reach our rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants faster in a more top-down way and in refining our strategy towards higher efficiency.

4. Expansion: As we will expand to newer geographies through partnerships, we seek help in planning our strategy for these new geographies. We also seek connections that can help us scale our impact exponentially to a rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendant’s base. Further, the financial support provided by Solve will help us to grow our Technology team, and Build Strategic Partnerships to expand to newer geographies (Expansion)

The traditional healers and traditional birth attendants are highly respected in last-mile remote rural communities. They perform cultural rituals and provide essential social support to patients. Their clients trust them and share their secrets with them.  We believe that traditional healers and traditional birth attendants are useful and reliable partners in the performance of primary health facilities. This belief is based on years of experience in remote and hard-to-reach areas, where health facilities are few and far between and numbers of skilled health providers severely limited. Traditional healers remain the only option for remote rural patients.  We are the digital platform that connects traditional healers and traditional birth attendants with health workers. This is different from other digital systems that connect a patient directly to a health worker. Health workers communicate with traditional healers and traditional birth attendants each other they learn, meaning that health care delivery improves incrementally. We enable a connected network of health workers, traditional healers, and traditional birth attendants that can help individual patients as a team.

There are many data that the primary healthcare facilities collect in a patient record system. However, the data we collect is different. Our data is the communication between health workers, traditional healers, and traditional birth attendants getting advice and making referrals between health facilities, prioritizing appointments, and organizing urgent transfers. This data helps health manager to catalyze better decision-making. 

The following impact goals for ourselves are all part of our mission and vision:

Goals for the next 12 months

• User testing:  We will onboard traditional healers and traditional birth attendants, to strengthen their efforts to use the data for improving their performance.
• User growth: Our user acquisition strategy is mainly through the network of traditional healers and traditional birth attendants. The primary healthcare facilities are the point of contact in the traditional healers and traditional birth attendants they are integrated into.
• refine our model and internal processes. We want to ensure that our internal processes and model are able to scale and utilize technology in an efficient way that ensures the data collection process improves the performance of primary health care services. 

Goals in the next 5 years

• We have scaling plans and goals: To accomplish this we are building our team and expanding partnerships including strategic partnerships with primary healthcare facilities, government, and civil society organizations. We believe the sustainable impact is best achieved through partnerships and have as a result embed our platform into government institutions and processes.
• Support systems change activities: We will increase attention to data to action through improving the performance of primary healthcare services including working with governments to develop policies, sharing expertise to support innovation, and collaborating with researchers, policymakers, and implementers.

Measuring primary healthcare performance success through the experiences of traditional healers and traditional birth attendants, rather than numbers on a spreadsheet is an important step toward quality improvement. Our Team wants to harness the unique power of traditional healers and traditional birth attendants to affect change within their own communities. In this way, our data collection support is highly contextualized for the communities. We want to reach (gain access to) communities who otherwise would never have access to knowledge about their health data or the support available to help them to determine their path toward primary healthcare performance improvement.

Compared to competitors, we are unique by connecting rural traditional healers and traditional birth attendants and healthcare workers thus going beyond primary care. With the use of a simple digital tool, they improve patient referrals and reduce frictions and inefficiencies in the remote rural healthcare system.”  We, therefore, improve rural health care and increases the number of appropriate referrals in remote, low-skilled centers. 

We believe that traditional healers and traditional birth attendants cannot be substitutes for skilled providers but strongly believes that they can contribute to the survival of patients by facilitating access to needed information, clinical services, and support.

In other words, traditional healers and traditional birth attendants can effectively convey vital information to families and communities in culturally appropriate ways that will help them to recognize the danger signs of the patients and know where to go for help (referral). We believe that traditional healers and traditional birth attendants meet vital community needs in supporting patients throughout illness periods.

We advocate for traditional healers and traditional birth attendants to work closely with health planners, health professionals, and other members of the formal health system as a strong link between the community and the health services. Traditional healers and traditional birth attendants should be included in community education and mobilization efforts.

The traditional healers and traditional birth attendants use Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), Open data kit uploaded to contact health workers in primary healthcare facilities, and share a form designed per service including text and visuals. The platform works as follows: The traditional healers and traditional birth attendants use the platform for free and are directed immediately to the most appropriate health worker on call in their area. The traditional healers and traditional birth attendants complete a form specific to that health worker, ensuring that a clinical decision can be made efficiently. Typically, there are three outcomes: The patient is transferred urgently, the patient is given an appointment The specialist teaches the frontline health worker how to manage the patient. Data analysis and reporting is provided to health managers, surfacing insights on previously unrecorded referral data. 

We will train traditional healers and traditional birth attendants to collect the patient’s data and better identify patients’ challenges such as obstetric emergencies and refer them to primary healthcare clinics using our platform. These traditional healers and traditional birth attendants interact face-to-face with different patients in the community to understand what problems they currently face. Next, these traditional healers and traditional birth attendants routinely gather patients’ information on critical problems.

Once data are collected, these data are analyzed, checked, and synthesized. The information is then shared with the pertinent local primary healthcare facilities. At the primary healthcare clinics, they will implement examination of the patients as well as ensure the patients are aware of and involved in the medical decisions. This process ensures that everyone understands how and when something will happen, which builds accountability into decision-making processes and closes the feedback loop that often exists between traditional healers and traditional birth attendants, community, and primary healthcare clinics. 

We are actively trying to improve our staff's diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as data collecting and insight into action. In all facets of our company, we assure and emphasize diversity, equity, and inclusion. Addressing inequities has been highlighted as a critical component of our work, and we have brought in experts to examine how diversity, equity, and inclusion might be represented in data gathering techniques. Our data gathering represents patient inclusion and community diversity. We have made a few measures, but we are dedicated to taking greater steps to make diversity, equity, and inclusion a key component of our organizational culture. We believe that representative data gathering and insight to action from all demographic groups are critical.

We offer healthcare solutions that connect the traditional healers and traditional birth attendants from remote and underserved communities with primary healthcare workers, through a mobile application, to help efficiently treat patients—while ensuring that patient information is collected, processed, and stored securely, and shared only with relevant health workers attending to a patient’s case.

The solution eliminates delaying the dissemination of life-saving information and helps health facilities and workers provide timely treatment to patients. It also facilitates training and solutions for traditional healers and traditional birth attendants.

We enable traditional healers and traditional birth attendants from rural areas to contact health workers at primary healthcare and share a form designed for patients’ data and experiences. This information helps health workers to make a call to receive a case locally in the clinic or requires a referral. Furthermore, we support health workers in managing patients, facilitating necessary referrals, and laying the foundation for efficient access to health workers for underserved communities

We are discovering and cultivating contributors who are interested in monitoring the performance of basic healthcare services. We believe there is significant worldwide interest in these two sectors, which we will be able to capitalize on in order to get funds. Our strategy is to establish long-term viability through consistent donations and grants. We consider foundation grant financing to have an influence on health systems. It is used to accelerate system expansion and scaling. In the long run, this boosts our commerciality. Partnerships with governmental and non-governmental organizations are being considered. We are now working on a new business model that is focused on monetizing the data that we collect in our operations. This methodology will allow us to increase our revenue capacity and operational margins while decreasing our costs. However, we do not want to rely on financing for revenue and instead aim to be self-sustaining by delivering a service where a market need has been identified.

We spent the last six months prototyping the solution with potential partners, listening to the potential traditional healers, traditional birth attendants, and primary healthcare workers, improving the customer journey, establishing the business/financial model and operation, designing strategies for business development and marketing, and expanding the network to find growth opportunities. Following our trial, has developed a diversified funding stream to assist the measurement of primary health care facility performance in rural regions, including (1) philanthropic contributions, individual contributors, and (2) rewards. (3) Financial sustainability has been achieved through in-kind assistance from government partners, as well as pledged funding for operating costs.

Our immediate main clients are primary healthcare institutions that aim to enhance quality and performance by leveraging actionable patient information, knowledge, and experience of primary healthcare facilities.

We, as a non-profit, provide time and money to build data gathering methods, while our partner groups use community contacts to promote participation in our needs assessments and gather manpower to monitor the effectiveness of primary healthcare institutions. To become sustainable, we invest in decreasing continuing expenses and growing income. To construct a solution at scale, we must become financially sustainable in order to inspire replicators to arise. We believe replicators must be financially sustainable and feasible within a few years in order to achieve mass replication, which would lead to an industry.