WEBINAR ON “CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTATION AND SUSTAINABILITY OF HEALTH CARE USING ICT” IN DHAKA October 15, 2019

A webinar on ‘Challenges in Implementation and Sustainability of Health Care Using ICT’ took place at IPHN office in Dhaka on Tuesday, organized by mPower Social Enterprises in collaboration with SPIDER and Stockholm University. The aim of this session was to gather health experts from around the globe and to highlight Bangladesh and Africa’s journey and success in digital health solutions, so that agencies from both regions can make the right decision to invest in implementation and scaling up digital tool for health solutions.

The Keynote Speaker of the session Dr. Anuraj Shankar, ScD, Research Fellow at Oxford University, Centre of Tropical Medicine and Global Health shared his experience and difficulties of scaling up the use of digital tools. “Operation and monitoring is often an ignored area when it comes to actual implementation of digital tools. Which is why often our user case is not clear, the data we collect is not very useful. Also, the human gap of supervisors not understanding the analysis and workers not trusting the conclusions.”

The chair of this webinar, Dr. SM Mustafizur Rahman, Line Director, National Nutrition Service (NNS) emphasized on NNS’ stands in this “We have been successful in implementing digital tools in both operational and service level.” “Our main focus is now to be able to reach the maximum number of beneficiaries and make the system sustainable, so that the progress does not hamper due to funding constraints.” Said Dr. Rahman.

In the end of this session Mr. Mridul Chowdhury, Found & CEO of mPower Social Enterprises, who was also the moderator of the session expressed his concern about data confidentiality. Dr. Johnblack Kabukye, one of the guest speakers from Uganda Cancer Institute said, “We must establish the security of data from policy level to make sure the confidentiality, especially data related to sensitive conditions.”