Kenya needs to adopt medical innovations
Group Chief Executive Officer at Kenyan insurance provider AAR Insurance Caroline Munene has said that for Kenya to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) over the next five years, the country needs to identify and adopt medical technological innovations that improve early detection and prevention of diseases while lowering the cost of treatment.
In a column in Business Daily Africa, Munene said that investing in the latest healthcare innovations should be a national priority alongside achieving health insurance coverage for all. “In adopting innovative medical technology, healthcare providers can ensure diseases are detected and treated early enough when it is relatively cheaper to do so,” she said. “This is especially the case with non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, stroke and hypertension which are on the rise and are expensive to treat and manage.”
Munene highlighted that the medical technology innovations with the potential to significantly improve the Kenyan healthcare delivery system include those that enable early detection of illnesses, as procedures such as biopsies and endoscopes are both invasive and costly. She said that the use of non-invasive procedures using the latest technology reduces the cost of surgery as the patient doesn’t have to spend an inordinately long time recuperating in hospital. “While the latest breakthrough medical technology innovations come with a high price tag, they ultimately reduce costs of patient care over the long-term,” she explained. Muene also highlighted the fact that lowering treatment costs also brings down health insurance premiums, in turn improving coverage.