From Barefoot Doctors To Autonomous Mobile Clinics

Innovation From Barefoot Doctors To Autonomous Mobile Clinics Shaoshan Liu Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 27, 2022, 06:45am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Dr.

Shaoshan Liu is CEO and founder of PerceptIn, an intelligent robotics company. getty Although the world has witnessed tremendous economic growth and technological advancements in the past few decades, today there are still over 600 million people living in extreme poverty. Most of these people live in the least developed countries (LDCs), and while regular visits to our family doctors have become a routine in our daily lives, people who live in LDCs have very limited or even no access to healthcare.

When we examine the details of healthcare expenditure data, the numbers are staggering: Developed countries (e. g. , the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD countries) such as the U.

S. spend roughly 10% of their GDP on healthcare, yet many LDCs don’t even have 5% of their GDP to spare on healthcare. Realizing the seriousness of this problem, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 ( SDG 3 ) has declared a universal health goal to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all by 2030.

SDG3 is a fabulous goal, but here comes the hard question — how? There are very limited medical resources in LDCs, thus they are constrained on the healthcare supply side. People in LDCs have virtually no financial resources for healthcare and, as a result, are constrained on the healthcare consumption side. LDC governments are struggling with their own economic situations and have no extra funding for healthcare, so they are constrained on the investment side.

In addition, solely relying on foreign aid is not sustainable. To address this problem, an innovative healthcare delivery method that bridges the supply side and the consumption side yet requires minimal investment to initiate is imperative. I believe technology is the answer to this hard question, but before delving into technical solutions, let us consult history for a potential answer.

MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Most of you may have never heard the term barefoot doctors , but barefoot doctors were an effective, efficient, less technological but extremely interesting solution in China back in the 1960s. During this time, parts of rural China could have been considered an LDC, as it faced some of the same problems LDCs face today. A medical team that was providing healthcare services in these areas realized that most peasants were suffering from only a few diseases, which could be easily categorized and treated.

With this observation, the medical team took one step further to train a few of the locals to diagnose and treat these diseases. These locals were able to take this knowledge with them and help many remote villages to not only provide healthcare services but also spread basic yet essential medical knowledge. Armed with basic medical knowledge, they soon formed a national network to provide primary care services and training.

Collectively, they were also given a very down-to-earth name: “barefoot doctors. ” In retrospect, these barefoot doctors provided extremely affordable healthcare services, thus effectively bridging the supply side and the consumption side. In addition, the government only had to provide basic training to these barefoot doctors to initiate the primary care network.

Examining the details of barefoot doctors, two key factors emerge: mobility and access to medical knowledge, both made extremely affordable. Today, instead of replicating the barefoot doctor miracle, these two factors can be made extremely affordable through recent technological innovations. One solution is the autonomous mobile clinic (AMC) .

The “autonomous” part allows AMCs to navigate to places where healthcare services are most needed, thus solving the mobility problem. The “mobile clinic” part allows healthcare access and knowledge sharing on-site, thus solving the access problem. In addition, the AI doctor within AMCs can serve unlimited patients and help lift the supply-side constraints.

Although AMCs look far-fetched today, especially for LDCs, in recent years the world has experienced the cost of autonomous robots dropping dramatically as the supply chain matures, as I noted in my previous article . Before AMCs drop below a reasonable cost for mass-scale deployments in LDCs, some technologies within AMCs, such as AI doctors, can already be utilized for healthcare services in LDCs. These AI doctors can be installed on tablets equipped with low-cost sensors (e.

g. , temperature sensors) to perform basic diagnostics. These tablets can be distributed to people in LDCs to provide basic healthcare services.

For instance, to address the healthcare resource allocation problem, AI algorithms have been developed for optimizing community healthcare worker scheduling in communities in Africa. To conclude, the ultimate goal of technological advancements is to advance humanity. In the case of healthcare in LDCs, the barefoot doctor success story demonstrates that affordable mobility and healthcare access are the key factors.

Autonomous mobile clinics enable these exact key factors through technological advancements. However, Rome was not built in a day, so this global problem has to be addressed step by step. The first step involves AI doctors, which can already provide basic diagnostic and educational capabilities to address some healthcare problems in LDCs.

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