Telehealth for Rural Healthcare
MLC Vanguard | Created by Kaaro Health
The Kaaro Telehealth platform, makes it possible for doctors, who live and work in cities, to simultaneously serve the needs of up to 5 clinics without having to relocate to rural areas.
1,625,000 Lives Impacted
Since 2017, the Kaaro rural clinic network, which serves about 1,100 patients each day, has already handled a combined total of 1,110,000 patient visits. Kaaro Health has demonstrated that optimising the time and efficiency of the available health workforce and proactively making their services remotely available in the remote, hard-to-reach areas can lead to a dramatic reduction in the incidence of sickness and death in these areas. Kaaro Health deliberately prioritizes villages deploying clinics in villages for which the nearest health facility is at least a full day’s walk away. 64 of 71 villages currently served fit this criterion, and for these residents, Kaaro Health has brought high quality primary health care within an hour’s walk. This has brought down the overall cost of access (in transportation to free public facilities and bribes) from an average of UGX17,000 ($4.6) down to under UGX8,000 ($2.1), which is also normally covered by the company-run micro-insurance scheme.
Each installation also creates at least 2 jobs, one for an enrolled nurse or midwife and a lab technician. Of the 1,110,000 patient visits, over 106,000 were pregnant women living with HIV, with over 40,500 of whom had potentially complicated pregnancies for which the intervention prevented the development of serious postnatal complications and transmission of HIV to infants, and enabled early diagnosis of HIV in infants.
The Innovation
Kaaro’s health innovation, which is a telehealth platform, makes it possible for doctors, who live and work in cities, to simultaneously serve the needs of up to 5 clinics without having to relocate to rural areas. Our digital platform helps doctors to connect to rural clinics, making each rural clinic in our network instantly capable of providing all the specialties that our 36 medical professionals are qualified to deliver. When a patient visits a clinic location within our network and presents with a condition that needs a doctor to review, instead of being referred to a distant health facility which may or may not have a doctor on staff, the nurse at the clinic conducts the necessary patient assessments and laboratory tests, enters results into our online electronic medical record (EMR) using the tablet computer provided, and initiates a remote consultation request to the appropriate doctor in our consultation system. The doctor, who is seated at one of our 2 remote hubs, accepts the request, reviews the patient’s medical records and laboratory test results, and initiates a live video, audio, voice, or text interaction with the nurse and patient before providing a diagnosis and prescription and/or referral. The patient then pays using mobile money or presents their micro-insurance details. This capability not only helps patients living in hard-to-reach areas to access primary health care easier and more affordably, it also results in a dramatic jump in rural clinics’ revenues.
About Kaaro Health
Kaaro Health supports healthcare entrepreneurs with remote medical staffing, asset finance, tailored engineering, and management support to enable them to provide advanced care to patients in peri-urban and rural communities in Uganda. Kaaro provides tailored medical equipment finance, custom renewable power solutions, as well as management expertise to healthcare SMEs to empower them to serve rural communities better.
