Sierra Leone, Customer Success and Innovation

A few years ago when my eldest daughter - who now rolls her eyes when I make bad jokes - was still in nappies, I spent some time in Sierra Leone.

It’s a wonderful, colourful, fun and friendly place and I loved it. I went to support a course that was helping train Nurse Anaesthetists in a country where anaesthetic provision – and medical provision in general, pales by comparison with the Western world. Here is a top tip - if you want to feel grateful for your healthcare system, go and spend some time talking to people about the conditions they sometimes work in in other countries. Suddenly you might not moan too much about the Wi-Fi.

I recently read an article in BMJ Innovations that reminded me of my time there. BMJ Innovations is a relatively new journal headed up by Dr Helen Surana

& Dr Ashley McKimm.

The website bumpf sets the tone nicely “a journal focussed on novel technologies, emerging digital health and pioneering medical devices”..with “systemic and narrative reviews as well as early-stage innovation reports that are designed to accelerate transferable lessons from new health solutions”.

I love this.

One of the recent articles they published was about the CRADLE system. If you’re wondering what this stands for, it is Community blood pressure monitoring in Rural Africa & Asia: Detection of underLying pre-Eclampsia and shock.

What does it mean? It’s a cheap, portable hand-held device with a built in traffic-light system for alerting untrained users that measures heart rate and blood pressure in pregnant women.

The three leading causes of maternal mortality worldwide are pre-eclampsia, obstetric haemorrhage and sepsis. And this little thing helps detect it early.

I really love this.

The original study on this was published in the Lancet (link below) and unfortunately the results of this are slightly hard to interpret because there were so many significant life-threatening or life ending events. And this messed with the statistics. But in a nutshell, it looked like it saved lives. Subsequent studies showed benefits in the risk of mothers bleeding to death.

What jumped out to me about the innovation reported, wasn’t something really fancy and desperately sexy, involving new algorithms, upgrades or even the introduction of an AI chatbot. They had gone out and collected the broken ones.

And then they looked at why they were broken.

And then they fixed them, and worked out what would be needed to make this sustainable in the long-term. The solutions included a way of reporting the broken ones, and providing the spare parts that were needed to teams so they could fix them. They made a video with the District Health Sisters that could be shared on WhatsApp and at local meetings to share the tips and tricks to fix these. And in the end, 3 years after scale-up, 96.5% of total devices distributed (1188/1231) could be functional after simple measures conducted within the healthcare facility.

In #healthtech, there is a huge amount of focus on pilots, then on scaling up and rolling out and making the solutions “sticky”. Maybe this is a touch cynical, but it feels like the actual sustainability of the project or the tools being used is not always the focus.

Anyone whom has been involved in transformation will probably recognise the pervasive energy that comes from a successful pilot, or a big Go-Live that gradually subsides. As projects move into the Business as Usual phase, it is all too easy for this momentum to wane. And actually, it isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes this full throttle approach cannot be sustained and things need to be dialled down a little for everyone’s wellbeing.

But anyone involved in longer-term projects will recognise the gentle drift that can happen.

That is where Customer Success comes into its own. Somewhere between an Account Manager and at times a good friend and confidante, Customer Success teams help optimise and keep the show on the road.

In the case of this study, it feels like this is a masterclass in customer success. They empowered their “clients” and supported them to find and develop the resources they needed to ensure the sustainability and success of this project. In doing so, they ensured longer-term value was obtained by everyone involved. They engaged the relevant stakeholders and supported them supporting others.

The result – this highly impactful intervention could continue to be used in low-resource areas where it is needed. And this, is frankly brilliant.