What makes your solution innovative?
World Telehealth Initiative is the only philanthropic organization providing telehealth services with a full complement of applications. Providers can engage in collaborative telehealth sessions for clinical consultations, peer-to-peer didactics, surgical mentoring, and emergent care. The custom-built platform will allow us to scale, reach more needy patients, and connect volunteer physicians to providers at low-resource hospitals and clinics.
Through a partnership with MIT Solve's community and other like-minded partners, WTI can scale to meet a portion of the global demand for accessible healthcare in fragile communities.
The custom matching platform will transition WTI from a manual pairing process to a more automated, interactive system. Timely and effective medical care is crucial during conflicts, natural disasters, or pandemics. World Telehealth Initiative collaborates with the Ministry of Health and local hospitals to ensure communities have the support they need during critical times. The platform will facilitate a more streamlined method to promptly get the proper care to patients in rapid response and scheduled consultations.
What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?
In 2023, World Telehealth Initiative aims to transform global healthcare by expanding from 40 to 65 total program sites.WTI will add 500 new volunteer physicians to our community to support the new program sites, providing over 50 medical specialties to clinics and hospitals worldwide. With over 1,500 supporting clinicians by year-end, we can bring life-changing healthcare to thousands more people in fragile contexts. Much like a hospital has on-call physicians, WTI can offer the same level of responsiveness to local needs with a global community of volunteers.
The network effect will facilitate growth as more program sites experience successful support and more volunteers experience the benefit of connecting with hospitals and clinics through telehealth, reducing cost, travel, and time off work.
The WTI tech team completed the backbone in Phase One and transitioned our previous database to the new platform allowing robust searching capability and deeper data collection.
In Phase Two, volunteer physicians use their portal for registration and entering their data which is essential to the matching algorithm. This phase ensures transparency with global health partnerships. We are currently in the rollout stage for Phase Two.
In Phase Three, the platform will be implemented with our partner sites, allowing the hospitals and clinics to directly find the specialists they need to meet the needs of their patients in a responsive, customized way.This phase will offer integrated matching of support opportunities.
Launching the next phase of our custom-built platform will facilitate the recruiting and onboarding of new volunteers and program site providers in a more efficient, accessible manner. The increased capacity is crucial to our ability to scale our programs.
In the next several years, we anticipate the platform will be available through a phone-based app, allowing program sites to reach out to physicians "on-demand" and volunteers to join calls from anywhere.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
- 3. Good Health and Well-being
- 10. Reduced Inequalities
- 17. Partnerships for the Goals
How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?
WTI tracks the number of volunteers, their specialties, the length of telehealth sessions they provide, and the program locations. With the launch of the custom-built platform, we can track more qualitative and quantitative metrics, such as the length of mentoring and didactic sessions provided, training topics, provider satisfaction surveys, and other aspects of our programs.
World Telehealth Initiative addresses many of SDG 3's key targets to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being.
To address maternal and neonatal mortality (Targets 3.1 & 3.2), WTI is expanding support for maternity centers through hub-and-spoke models in several countries. Linking remote clinics with referral hospitals with telehealth provides on-demand support in time-critical patient care, such as during labor and delivery.
WTI supports patient care for those impacted by epidemics, infectious diseases, and neglected tropical diseases (Target 3.3) by bringing together experts to create care plans that meet the patient's unique needs and the community's available resources.
Achieving universal health coverage (Target 3.8) is more sustainable, lower-cost, and responsive when provided via telehealth. WTI addresses the burden of expenses related to travel, off-site training opportunities, and poor patient care through the network of physicians, nurses, therapists, and technicians working together through our four support applications.
What is your theory of change?
The lack of quality, affordable, and timely healthcare is a global crisis. World Telehealth Initiative aims to revolutionize global healthcare by providing quality medical expertise where and when required. To achieve these ambitious goals, we must work synergistically with Ministries of Health, non-governmental organizations, community leaders, corporate sponsors, and investors to find sustainable solutions for communities that make sense culturally, financially, and logistically.
Activities or Inputs:
· Identify and establish partnerships with healthcare organizations, local clinics, and Ministries of Health in fragile, hard-to-reach, resource-limited areas.
· Provide training and support to onsite providers through donated Telehealth technology and access to WTI's network of medical experts.
· Collect essential information on telehealth sessions and WTI's program to measure health, knowledge, and acceptability outcomes quantitatively and qualitatively.
· Disseminate results with key stakeholders and international health organizations to expand programs and inform and improve telehealth service delivery to reduce healthcare access gaps worldwide.
Outputs:
· Increased access to medical expertise and training
· Increased provider knowledge and skills development, both clinically and in telehealth technology skills
· Creation of best practices guide/model to inform philanthropic, international Telehealth program implementation
· Critical data on telehealth programming (acceptability, feasibility, and performance), Inform telehealth policy)
Short-Term Outcomes:
· Improved diagnosis and treatment of individual patients
· Increased medical knowledge gained
· Increased access to healthcare for underserved areas, including primary and preventative care
· Data on program effectiveness
Intermediate Outcomes:
· Reduced healthcare costs (decreased length of stay, decrease in number of unnecessary referrals)
· Improved population health outcomes in the community both through our support network and by connecting existing provider resources within the region (e.g., improved management of chronic disease)
· Increased patient engagement and increased acceptability and trust of medical professionals in the community
· Improved provider ability to use Telehealth technology
Long-Term Outcomes:
· Decreased burden of disease
· Increase healthcare innovation
· Sustainable improvement in the healthcare system and linkages
· Provider retention
Our evaluation plans are based on our hopes to effectively measure telehealth's short, intermediate, and long-term outcomes on improving healthcare in resource-limited settings. Our monitoring and evaluation framework is still evolving. It will include conducting surveys, focus group discussions with key stakeholders (including site partners and supporting providers), and collecting crucial data points via our platform.
The implementation and completion of our platform will revolutionize our ability to collect essential information to inform and improve telehealth in resource-limited settings. The data points that our platform will capture include the type of session, number of providers present, diagnosis reached, and other health outcome information, including avoiding a referral or a change in patient care based on the consultation. With the launch of our matching platform, we will continue improving our monitoring and evaluation processes to measure the short- and long-term impacts of WTI's programs.
Describe the core technology that powers your solution.
World Telehealth Initiative is underpinned by over $200 million of investment in telehealth technology. WTI uses a cloud-based telehealth system to power connections between clinical needs and the medical experts that can fulfill those requirements.
Teladoc Health's InTouch Lite V3 telehealth device has the highest connectivity and network performance, top-of-the-line audio/video capabilities, and immersive design. Purpose-built for healthcare with proactive monitoring and connection optimization technology to manage highly variable network conditions, a constant state of readiness is maintained for all devices and locations. We comply with all relevant state, national, and international laws and regulations, including the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, known as HIPAA. We also regularly validate the controls we have in place through annual assessments and audits, including SOC II, Type Two, and HITRUST certification.
Physicians use diagnostic devices such as ultrasound, intraoral cameras, ECGs, and stethoscopes connected to the InTouch Lite to assess and treat patients accurately - from 100 or 1,000 miles away.
The custom-built matching platform currently in development uses industry-proven secure and scalable programming tools: Ruby on Rails is used for the server-side back-end (data storage, matching logic, etc.) and React for the front-end UI/UX (input forms, custom controls, etc.).
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new application of an existing technology
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
- Audiovisual Media
- Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
If your solution has a website or an app, provide the links here:
N/A
In which countries do you currently operate?
- Argentina
- Bangladesh
- Bhutan
- Cambodia
- Ecuador
- Ethiopia
- Guinea
- Haiti
- Kenya
- Malawi
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Togo
- Ukraine
- Vietnam
- Puerto Rico
In which countries will you be operating within the next year?
- Argentina
- Bangladesh
- Bhutan
- Cambodia
- Ecuador
- Ethiopia
- Guinea
- Haiti
- Kenya
- Malawi
- Nigeria
- Pakistan
- Togo
- Ukraine
- Vietnam
- Puerto Rico
