This spring, I had the privilege of being a guide for the NTD Challenge Team of the 2021 Forbes Ignite Fellowship teams. The Fellowship is a four-month-long program that awards 30 young female professionals around the world, challenging them to work together to create executable solutions in the area of health care and artificial intelligence. This year, the Fellowship’s key issues were:
genetics
data sharing
mental health
impact investing
triage in developing markets
neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)
My team of five exceptionally talented women from India, the UK, South Africa, Spain and Qatar represented expertise spanning clinical medicine, pharmacology, infectious diseases research, software programming, entrepreneurship and machine learning. Their challenge question for NTDs was:
How can we find common interventions to reduce the impact of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs)?
I was impressed with their enthusiasm, teamwork, empathy and commitment to help people affected by NTDs, and enjoyed learning along with them.
To help my team explore their question, I shared my experience—particularly in India—with continuum of care issues for people affected by chronic disabling NTDs like leprosy and lymphatic filariasis. In India, people affected by these diseases are scattered in poorer and less resourced communities, dependent on ASHAs (Accredited Social Health Activists): the frontline female government health workers instituted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. ASHAs are the first, and often only, point of contact for health care in these communities. Since nearly all of India’s national health programs run on the backs of the ASHAs, chronic NTD care holds low priority. Further, the NTD training that ASHAs receive usually focuses on detection rather than care, and is often soon forgotten.
A user-friendly, technology-based solution that enables real time advice on care would go a long way in empowering ASHAs and preventing increased disability or advanced disease status. The NTD Challenge team determined that this was their project’s mission:
To advocate, empower and educate communities with, or at risk of, NTDs in a gender sensitive way by leveraging existing technology.
After extensive discussions, initial prototyping, and meeting with Dr. Suresh Munuswamy of the Indian Institute of Public Health’s HiRapid Lab, the team developed an optimized, smartphone-compatible voice/chatbot for ASHAs. The tool, ASHA Saheli (saheli is girlfriend in Hindi), uses an initial ten questions on leprosy self-care. The questions can handle primary variations and support three languages: English, Hindi and Telugu.
During the final project presentations in May, the NTD Challenge team was one of two teams the Fellowship judges selected for honorable mentions, particularly for the potential to positively impact lives and the passion and capability of the team to deliver on business vision.
Our own projects and innovations at American Leprosy Missions (ALM) gave me additional insights to share with the Fellowship team this spring. At ALM, we’re pioneering another digital tool for health care workers like ASHAs: the DHARA WL2 app (Digital @ Home-based AI-enabled Real-time Appropriate interventions for WASH, Leprosy & Lymphatic filariasis). Currently in its testing phase, this app will assist health care personnel in screening and managing NTD cases during home visits, instead of people affected traveling to the nearest medical facility.
Another initiative to share with the NTD Challenge team was our integrated water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and NTDs Jagruti program, a partnership between ALM and Lepra Society in endemic regions in Asia. We’re successfully empowering local women through training and digital technology to manage household WASH, home-based care and NTD referrals in their own communities.
Opportunities like the Forbes Ignite Fellowship bring together some of the brightest and most capable minds to address pressing issues in public health. By pushing for innovative solutions, these collaborations move us closer to a world free of NTDs through the deployment of existing tools and development of new solutions.
Dr. Shyamala Anand
Senior Technical Advisor for NTDs
American Leprosy Missions