Harnessing the Power of Chatbots for a Healthier Africa
Reach Digital Health service designer, Neville Tietz, writes about the transformative potential of using chatbots to revolutionize healthcare in low to middle-income countries.
Africa has a young and vibrant population, and with the median age being 19 years old, youth make up almost half of the continent’s population. With this population group being so young, mobile and smartphone penetration is widespread across the continent. Reach Digital Health leverages this by using channels like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to connect with individuals across the continent to incur lasting change.
Mobile-based health interventions are an innovative way to help individuals take control of their health and make better choices. Reach has been developing a digital health platform using research, behavioural science, and technology to enable individuals to lead healthy lives.
The platform aims to help individuals adopt healthy behaviours to improve their health outcomes across various domains; TB, maternal and child health and sexual and reproductive health. Each user’s health journey entails continuous measurement, personalisation, and adjustments ensuring the most impactful interventions for each actor. Resulting in the right information leading to the right behaviour persisting over time. These actors include citizens, healthcare workers, and the healthcare system.
Let’s consider a hypothetical case of a female user living in Kibera, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. She has an unplanned pregnancy and a low socio-economic status, poor nutrition habits, and a mostly sedentary lifestyle. She’s experiencing high blood pressure and is at risk of developing gestational hypertension. This condition could lead to preeclampsia, a rare but serious condition that could result in seizures during pregnancy or even eclampsia, potentially life-threatening for both the mother and baby. She doesn’t have access to a health facility like a clinic or understand the risks that may occur during this time.
Receiving health information about healthy behaviour is unlikely to motivate sustained behaviour change. Reach Digital Health understands this and seeks to personalise user interventions by continuously assessing behaviour, identifying risk markers, mapping behavioural impact measures, tailoring content, and testing hypotheses.
For digital health interventions to have a lasting effect, the required positive behaviour must be repetitive and persist over time. Our platform constantly adjusts to deliver the most appropriate, impactful interventions for each actor in the system at the right time: the citizen, the healthcare worker and the healthcare system.
Our Theory of Change focuses on enabling behaviour change by ensuring that individuals have the capability, opportunity, and motivation to perform the desired behaviour and persist at it. In practice, our theory of change is an ongoing cycle where Reach;
- Conducts behavioural and contextual assessments to determine what keeps a person from persisting with the desired behaviour
- Maps behavioural impact measures to establish clear user profiles and correlate them with content that works the best
- Tailors content through strategic sequencing and prioritisation to meet the specific user’s needs and improve clinical outcomes
- Continues testing hypotheses within the persistence framework and updates these and related content accordingly.
However, more than engaging citizens is required. This is why Reach has developed a platform that constantly adjusts to deliver the most appropriate, impactful interventions for each actor in the system at the right time:
- The citizen,
- The healthcare-worker
- And the healthcare provider (health department officials).
Mobile-based health interventions have the potential to transform healthcare by enabling individuals to take control of their health and make better choices. By personalising interventions and continuously assessing and adjusting them, we can improve health outcomes for individuals with limited access to healthcare. With the continued growth of the mobile market in Africa, digital health interventions will likely become a critical part of the healthcare system on the continent.
