Many people use apps on their cell phones to take photos, text, and stay in touch with friends. School of Medicine Professor Dr. Karen Yeates, Meds’97, uses apps to improve people’s health and save lives.
Dr. Yeates has received major funding to help develop several large-scale programs that use apps to monitor and improve the lives of women in Africa suffering from health issues such as cervical cancer and preeclampsia.
Access to health care can be difficult for women in rural villages in Africa, as some have to travel hours to get to an urban medical centre.
The solution? Innovation. Design a medical app that gives local health-care professionals the tools to work in the villages. Teams of nurses are trained and empowered to use the app to send patients’ medical screening photos and health information to doctors in urban areas for evaluation.
“There is a lot of global health research using mobile health for various things,” says Dr. Yeates. “You name a problem and there is probably an app out there for it – maternal health, neonatal care, COVID, kidney care.”
Dr. Yeates first got involved in doing health care in Africa when a physician friend invited her to help at an HIV clinic.
“That was it for me. I felt very at home. I was already doing a fair bit of research into access to care for Indigenous people (in Canada). I realized there was a lot of nephrology work that could be done in Africa.”
She first got involved in the cervical cancer screening programs while working on a dialysis program in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. Women were being referred to her clinic from all over Tanzania with kidney failure due to late-stage cervical cancer. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help them. In Canada, almost no one dies of cervical cancer because of access to preventive screening.
So Dr. Yeates, working with partners in Africa, looked at mobile technology to solve the problem. In 2016-2017, the project screened about 10,000 women a year. The latest version of the project, which has been delayed by COVID-19, is hoping to screen 100,000 women a year.
Launching a large-scale mobile health program is not something Dr. Yeates was taught in medical school, but it is now a vital skill she has learned. She knows how to work with partners to create an effective mobile health program strategy that can attract funding, produce data that shows the health outcomes, and – if the initial project is successful – easily scale to expand and reach more people.
“I learned a lot over the years through trial and error,” Dr. Yeates says. “I find that funders now won’t fund a glitzy app that can do x-y-z unless you can prove that you have a plan on how to sustain and scale it.”
Her work is getting attention from organizations like the Gates Foundation and has been featured on CNN and BBC World News. In 2015, she received $1 million from the Canadian government for a mobile platform help monitor pregnant women in Tanzania for preeclampsia-eclampsia.
“Using technology to overcome barriers like access to care is so important,” Dr. Yeates says. “These programs provide us an incredible opportunity to save women’s lives.”
