RESULTS

Overview

Since 2007, the Abbott Fund has invested $4 million and Abbott has donated diabetes products and Determine HIV rapid tests worth $1.5 million to support AMPATH (Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare), headquartered in Eldoret, Kenya. AMPATH’s programs include prevention, testing, care and treatment for people impacted by HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria, diabetes, malnutrition, cancer and heart disease. The primary focus of our support has been AMPATH’s home-based counseling and testing initiative, designed to offer counseling, testing and, if necessary, treatment for people impacted by the targeted diseases. The goal of this multiyear initiative is to test all two million people in AMPATH’s Western Kenya catchment area. AMPATH is now providing care and treatment for more than 150,000 HIV-infected adults and children, as well as 5,000 diabetes patients.

The use of simple technology is bringing health care directly to people’s homes rather than requiring them to go to a hospital or clinic, which is often a hardship for those without reliable transportation. AMPATH's community health workers locate and keep track of people in remote locations by using handheld GPS systems, test people with simple rapid tests and enter data into smartphones running the Android operating system (the pilot projects used handheld PDAs).

That data, in turn, is sent to the AMPATH-developed Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS), which stores data that can be easily accessed by medical professionals for diagnosis and follow-up. The OpenMRS is now in more than 40 countries.