Professor S. Yunkap Kwankam, CEO of GeHCs, was recently interviewed for CreditSuisse’s Podcast Global Investor on the topic of eHealth for all. Professor Kwankam discussed the role of information and communication technology (ICT) and mobile phones in the delivery of health care today. He described the six challenges he sees facing ICT :
- Creating a “knowledge commons” for eHealth, a widely available repository of information on eHealth that is global in scope.
- Scaling up eHealth interventions, based on evidence, to a size commensurate with the magnitude of the problems to be addressed.
- Creating integrated eHealth systems to resolve the perennial issues of siloed systems and lack of interoperability.
- Transforming health workers into ePractitioners and building individual and institutional capacity to use eHealth tools and services.
- Developing information and communications technology (ICT) for health by viewing health as a production function, and investigating where ICT can support it.
- Building ICT for the health system of the future by anticipating future needs, thereby reducing the time lag from problem identification through intervention to seeing the impact.
Source: S. Y. Kwankam, “Bulletin of the World Health Organization,” vol. 90, 2012, pp. 395–397