Fionet digital tools deliver quality healthcare to community settings — from the village to the health center — ensuring consistent case management, accurate diagnostic testing, and ground truth data.
Fionet Suite integrates four sets of tools
1 Mobile Electronic Medical Records
Without Fionet, patients walk to their Electronic Medical Record in a medical center. With Fionet, the Electronic Medical Record walks to them.
In patients’ homes, the community healthcare worker’s smartphone or tablet already has data for everyone in that home. Fionet is linked to the national registry and any other relevant databases authorized.
As the healthcare encounter proceeds, new data is automatically uploaded so that the full patient record is ready for the next encounter, whether at home, health post, or health center.
The Rwanda Ministry of Health is a leader in digitizing primary healthcare in the community. The Ministry selected the Fionet Platform as their electronic Community Health Information System.
2 Case Management Guidance
Fionet Case Management Guidance delivers MoH protocols to the frontline, resulting in upgraded assessment, testing, treatment, referrals, and data capture. Interacting with these digital tools upscales the proficiency of healthcare workers as they deliver care.
Fionet Suite is a performance equalizer. Its purpose is not to make best practices better, but to make them consistent.
This video shows two of Fionet Suite’s community health modules in action:
In the top right quadrant the CHW is using the Growth Monitoring module to measure the child’s MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference).
In the bottom right quadrant the CHW is using the Pneumonia Assessment module to measure the child’s respiration rate.
Remote supervisors and managers can review anonymized, aggregated data and analytics anywhere, anytime, on any device.
To better manage 8 million HIV patients, South Africa sought a tool to investigate how to move high-quality HIV testing and treatment to the community. In South Africa, HIV testing involves an algorithm of three different, sequential rapid tests. Unaided and frequently without supportive supervision, community healthcare workers would be challenged to consistently:
Perform this algorithm, perform the tests, and interpret the tests correctly.
Put the patient on the right treatment and referral plan.
Rapidly upload correct data.
With Fionet, South Africa’s National Health Lab Services proved this can be done well. For example:
Diagnostic results performed manually by expert lab techs at Wits were compared with Fionet’s automated rapid testing capabilities.
Their findings - published in BMC Infectious Diseases - demonstrated that Fionet’s AI was 99.5% concordant with the diagnostic result by the expert lab tech.
3 Point-of-Care Testing
Fionet Point-of-Care Testing transforms the accuracy of processing, interpretation and data-capture of community testing. Fionet’s digital tools also provide for large-scale testing capability to support pandemic preparedness.
When COVID hit, the Canadian government used Fionet mobile health IT platform to do point-of-need testing at Canada’s busiest airport. Fionet high-volume rapid test processing technology brought pre-boarding testing time for a planeload down from 4 hours to 30 minutes.
In addition, Fionet IT infrastructure served as the backbone:
for PCR testing also done at the airport
for all data flow, from registering for a test and to delivering results to the central lab
for communicating results to passengers’ cell phones
The Canadian Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development used this project as the basis for its formal recommendation on future pandemic preparedness for Canada.
For certain clients, Fionet’s AI algorithms and automated quality controls documented and reduced rapid diagnostic testing errors — processing, interpretation, and data capture — by a factor of 10 within the first six weeks of use.
4 Data & Analytics
Fionet Data & Analytics produces real-time insights for remote managers — anytime, anywhere.
Frontline healthcare workers believe their job is to deliver healthcare, not so much capture data. With Fionet, data capture is an automated process, not an incremental activity for healthcare workers: each moment of care delivery is a moment of data capture.
The data captured and analyzed includes geo-temporal, clinical, epidemiological, operational, business, and proficiency data.
When the Colombian city of Armenia was afflicted by a dengue outbreak, community healthcare workers were sent house to house to do rapid dengue tests with Fionet. Because of real-time data capture, the result was a near instantaneous high-resolution heat map of dengue positivity rates (shown).
This led MoH managers to pinpoint several mosquito breeding grounds that, when drained, ended the outbreak.
USAID and DRC MoH carried out a study of malaria rates in several provinces using Fionet. Fionet’s malaria rate was on average 40% lower than the corresponding data in DHIS2. USAID and MoH will be publishing this shortly.
These results were somewhat unexpected to MoH, provincial governors, USAID, and even a multinational mining company operating in these provinces.
Indispensable to medical centers and labs achieving excellent case management, diagnostic testing, and correct ground data is their health IT infrastructure that establishes and integrates key IT functions: Electronic Medical Records + Case Management Guidance + Lab Testing Information System + Data/Analytics.
Fionet Suite’s digital tools establish these same integrated key IT functions but designed to suit community settings: mobile; light-footprint; bottom-up; simple; flexible; and affordable.
The result is a truly mobile health IT platform with which you can deliver quality healthcare at every level of the healthcare system.
Fionet mobile health IT infrastructure:
integrated digital tools at multiple levels of the healthcare system and the network that connects them.
AI Experience
We have been building AI and machine learning into multiple layers of Fionet technology from the start. Technological augmentation of human capability is the essence of Fionet Suite. We will continuously bring more AI capabilities, such as Natural Language Processing and Generative AI, into Fionet technology to increase frontline proficiency and capability, highlight risks, detect trends, identify outliers, and recommend modifications to public health campaigns.
Dr. Greenberg speaks with WIRED about Fio's founding vision for a transformative, community-based healthcare solution: Mobile technology to upscale frontline diagnosis and treatment integrated with data services to enhance remote tracking and supervision.