Newsletter Archives - Banda Health

How is the view from where you are standing?

November 20, 2019February 28, 2019 by Thomas Letchford

The view from here is pretty exhilarating

We are pretty excited about this map. It shows the next 20 clinics in sub-Saharan Africa that are about to transform the way they do healthcare. And how, you might ask, would they do that? With Banda Go – our business management solution.

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Banda Go powered clinics in the pipeline

How is the view from where you are now? For me here in Houston, it’s flat and industrial. For Andrew and the rest of our team at our office in Nairobi, it’s similarly urban and crowded, but with brighter colors and more lively streets. Steve has the best view from his porch overlooking the Rift Valley, and we try not to hold it against him.

The view that we are most excited about today is one we can all enjoy, from anywhere. Pause for a moment to look at this map with us. Stare and dream and hope for the future of healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa. The map shows what our pipeline looks like right now for Banda Go – the first twenty of our goal to reach thousands of clinics across the continent.

So far, four clinics in the Nairobi area have made the switch to our business management solution, Banda Go. With Banda Go automating inventory, cashier, accounting and reports, these clinics have stopped running out of medicine, cut out hours of paperwork, and no longer have to guess at the financial health of their business.
By keeping their businesses healthy, clinics using Banda Go do a better job at keeping their patients healthy.

This year, we are excited to see clinics transform into sustainable businesses known for reliable, quality healthcare. All it takes to use Banda Go is an internet connection and a laptop, so now it’s time to get hundreds of clinics on the path to better healthcare.

Over the next few months we will be bringing you their stories.

Thanks for being a part of this with us!

All the best,
Thomas Letchford

Donate to Banda Health

Your donation to Banda Health is an investment in someone else’s future. With your help, we will continue to improve Banda Go for clinics looking to transform the way they do healthcare. Thank you!

It’s my phone

May 8, 2022December 29, 2018 by Thomas Letchford

"It's my phone"

Use what you have in your hands.

Earlier this month, one of Kijabe Hospital’s young doctors, Dr. Benard Lango, was speaking to a group of visiting academics and aid organizations from around the world. He was giving a live demonstration of the Banda iMed app – a cutting edge, research-quality patient care tool that the Banda team developed for Kijabe’s inpatient medical team.

Intrigued by Lango’s presentation, the gentleman from the CDC in Atlanta asked, “Where did you get the phone that you use the app on?”

“It’s mine” said Lango.

“Did the ‘program’ provide it?”

“No, it’s my phone.”

“I see. Then did the ‘program’ subsidize it?”

“No. It’s just mine.”

I smiled as I backed Lango: “Good questions. What Dr. Lango and his phone highlight is the reality that this isn’t a program run from the outside. It’s just part of a faith-based, Kenyan hospital doing it’s best to help people. People here tend to get a lot done using whatever tools they have in their hands. They most often don’t have a lot of outside resources.” The visitors loved Lango and what they saw in their short time at Kijabe as much as we loved having them.

This visiting team was on a side trip from the Pan African Health Informatics conference that was being held this month in Nairobi. After the main meetings in town, Andrew and Jeremy from our Banda Health team made a comment that further highlighted the making-the-most-of-available-resources theme: “It seems that our small Banda team has been able to produce more than some of the other teams have who have more resources. It’s an encouragement, and we’re convinced we’ll continue coming up with great solutions for the frontline healthcare heroes we serve.”

In addition to patient-care transforming tools like the patient care improvement app for hospital teams, the Banda team is also rolling out another, much more powerful IT tool and getting it into the hands of small clinic owners. It’s called Banda Go for Clinics. Help us get Banda Go into hundreds of clinics and small hospitals across Kenya.

Thank you for being a part of this with us!

Banda Go is live in its first health center!

June 16, 2024September 20, 2018 by Thomas Letchford

BandaGo is live in its first health center!

In July 2018, St. Jude Clinic Chokaa became the first health center to go live with the new Banda Go. Early results have been exciting.

Banda Go is an IT solution that helps low-resource clinics deliver better healthcare and achieve financial stability.

Today, Banda Go is in one clinic. By the end of the year we hope to be in 20.

What is Banda Go?

IT solution for low-resource healthcare
Helps clinics get the most out of their available resources
Currently handles stockroom, patient tracking, and cash flow
Coming soon: integrated electronic medical records
Coming soon: artificial intelligence assisted diagnostics

Clinic #1: St. Jude Clinics Chokaa

Named for patron saint of desperate cases
Located in low-resource community
Operates on tiny margins
Primary care provider
Constantly writes off patient debt
Paper stockroom, patient tracking, and accounting “systems”

St. Jude Clinic was founded by two clinical officers, Boniface and Nelly, to take care of people who otherwise had to travel far to receive treatment. Banda Go can enable St. Jude Clinic to achieve financial stability, so that its doors remain open to the people who need it most.

Just a few weeks in, Banda Go already saves Boniface an hour a day on paperwork with automated reports. Because Banda Go allows for instant accounting of payments, stockroom levels, and patient visit history, St. Jude Clinic is beginning to take control of its healthcare delivery and its finances. That means Boniface and Nelly can take care of as many patients as possible without overreaching and threatening their ability to stay open. In the future, it may also enable them to raise funds for patients that cannot pay.

If that excites you, join us. Donate to fund the development of the Banda Go solution. Wear out a keyboard or two coding for us by joining our developer team. Tell your friends about us. Be a part of a group of people from around the world passionate about empowering healthcare heroes in low-resource settings.

If you have any questions or want to talk more about Banda Health, get in touch with me at steve.letchford@sim.org. I’d love to hear from you!

Gentle Persistence

Mercy walked into St. Jude Clinic on Chokaa Street in Kasarani Township, Kenya, shortly after its doors opened for the first time. She’d been having these awful headaches. At the clinic, a man called Boniface took her vitals. Very high blood-pressure. They’d need to run some blood work, maybe send her elsewhere for an EKG and a CT scan to check on her heart and her kidneys, respectively. But first, she had to start medication to bring her blood pressure down.

Mercy said no. Her grandmother had this high blood pressure as well. These tests would be expensive. Maybe she didn’t want to know more. Medication made her nervous. Would she have to take medication her whole life? She didn’t like the thought of that. Could they just give her something for the headaches?

Mercy came back repeatedly over the next several months. Sometimes she came for her two kids, sometimes for the headaches. She still wouldn’t accept blood pressure medication.

Eventually Boniface asked Nelly, his colleague at the clinic, to come in and talk to her. He wasn’t getting through to her. Her blood pressure was making him nervous; this could be really serious. Nelly sat down with Mercy. She spoke to her gently, kindly.

How long have these headaches been going on?

Tell me about your grandmother.

Did anyone else in your family have headaches like this, or high blood pressure?

We can figure this out. Maybe there is something we can fix that will take care of your blood pressure. If not, maybe you will have to take pills for a long time, but it will be OK.

Would you be willing to let us try?

They talked for a while. Mercy let down her guard, slowly. Finally, she agreed to start taking the pills. But, she couldn’t pay. They sent her home with the blood pressure medicine anyways.

In a more perfect world, Mercy would have come back for the blood work, the EKG and the CT scan. In Kasarani, Mercy’s best chance for a more perfect world is for Boniface and Nelly to be the best primary care providers they can be with the resources available to them and their patients.

Places like St. Jude Clinic are the key to good healthcare for patients like Mercy. As primary care providers, they are the doorway into healthcare. Like they did for Mercy, the healthcare providers at these clinics do so much more than work their way through a list of patients for the day. They listen, they gently teach, they persuade. They keep reaching out and following up. They are the best chance for healthcare built on relationships, for health providers that really see, know and care about their patients as neighbors, and as friends.

At Banda Health, this is who we want to work with. We’re building Banda Go for clinics like St. Jude. At first, they are small wins – how many patients did we see, who paid and who did not, how much of this medicine do we need to order this month? Later we will add a full suite of electronic medical records, and artificial intelligence to help make better diagnoses.

St. Jude Clinic is the first clinic powered by Banda Go. We already have plans for the next two in the coming weeks, and by 2020, we hope to be in 500. That is something like two million patients with access to better, more reliable, and constantly improving healthcare where they need it most.

The view from here is pretty exhilarating