Elsa Use Case: Digital Community Health Workers

Since the late 1960's Ref, Tanzania's Community Health Programs & Workers have played a vital role in the health and welfare of many communities across the country. These health workers are community members who undergo a 12 month training on the basics of healthcare provision as aligned with with the Tanzanian National Health Guidelines.

In many cases, Community Health Workers (CHWs) are the first point of contact between patients and the health system and are essential to the referral process and collection of high quality data.

Even though the care providers have frequent encounters with the community, they do not have the training necessary to deal with any non-trivial situations they may encounter. Given the reach of community health workers, empowering them with digital tools and decision support algorithms can have an immense impact on health delivery and outcomes.

Digital Health and Health Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

Digital health refers to the digitization and movement of health services to leveraging digital technology for improved efficiency, automation, and overall effectiveness.

Health Artificial Intelligence is the application of automated and human-like thinking and reasoning to problems in healthcare through the use of technology.

Digitization of healthcare is all around us from EMRs/ EHRs to telemedicine and even wearable technologies like smart watches that track heart rate across the day. This extensive spread of digital tools and technology in healthcare is allowing Artificial Intelligence applications to improve, as well as reach more and more people.

We now have the tools necessary to substantially empower our health workers to more accurately make decisions at an unprecedented scale.

Elsa Health

Elsa Health develops digital health tools - powered by Artificial Intelligence - for lower cadre healthcare workers, allowing them to make reliable, accurate, and life saving decisions in the field.

Implemented at the community level, Elsa's digital health tools powered by data driven algorithms provide a scalable path towards achieving national health goals.

Opportunities for Digital CHWs

Improved decision making at the last mile By equipping Community Health Workers with the necessary tools to make evidence-based and real-time decisions powered by data and algorithms, we can improve the triage flow and allow them to make more accurate decisions across the multitude of situations they encounter.

Additionally, with Elsa's ability to incorporate local epidemiology and disease patterns, CHWs are able to consider far more factors when making decisions. This means the decisions they make about their patients are more targeted and comprehensive. Furthermore, outbreak and pandemic monitoring is now extremely simple as all the devices on the ground can communicate with each other and produce a near-real-time assessment of community health.

Offline-first & real time data collection & sharing Data collection with Elsa's digital tools is offline first and supports peer-to-peer synchronization of data once internet access is regained.

For devices connected to the internet, all data is synchronized in real time between the devices, allowing for all reports generated for stakeholders to have accurate and relevant information for decision making.

Improved collaborative decision making Each Community Health Worker's device acts as an individual member of a team of devices that are working together towards the single goal of improving health information transfer and decision making by the users.

For example, when a group of Community Health Workers in a given set of villages are using Elsa, Elsa is able to integrate with local hospitals and leverage their patient diagnostic histories to establish a real-time epidemiology of the region. This allows Elsa's algorithms, and thus the health worker's decision making, to be both time and geographically relevant to the communities they serve.

Reach Out to Us

To learn more about our work, or if you are interested in working together, please reach out to us through our website, or follow us on social media!

To contact us directly visit our site: elsa.health/contact