Consultant at Living Goods

Purpose

Living Goods is looking for a consultant to develop a maturity model to support governments to assess their level of readiness to adopt mHealth solutions and to define a pathway to get to a point of readiness to implement and manage effective digital health programs for community health.

Background

Digital technologies are transforming health services. Unimpeded by geographical boundaries, smartphone-linked wearable sensors, point-of-need diagnostic devices, and medical-grade imaging, all built around real-time data streams and supported by automated clinical decision–support tools, are enabling care provision at community level.

“Despite demand and the obvious potential benefits of mHealth, rapid adoption particularly by governments is not yet occurring. While there are thousands of small-scale mobile systems in low-resource settings, many organizations and governments are running into challenges in scaling their mobile projects for greater impact. The main barriers are not the technology but rather systemic to healthcare.

In response to this challenge, Living Goods would like to develop and validate a simple Maturity Model to help governments develop and grow effective mobile programs for community health.

About this Project

Living Goods is in a major phase of growth as we aim to reach our long-term vision of spreading life-saving, sustainably-financed community health across the developing world. Our vison is that by 2030 every mother and child will have access to basic healthcare where and when they need it. However, Living Goods recognizes that we alone cannot reach every village, in every country. We seek to work with governments and community health implementing partners to support effective, high impact mHealth programs for community health.

To this end, this project will develop a maturity model and tools that will enable Living Goods (and other organisations) to work with governments to assess their level of readiness to adopt mHealth solutions and to define pathway to get to a point of readiness. The maturity model will enable governments understand what systems, processes and capacities need to be in place in order to deploy a mHealth solution effectively and at scale, and where they are along that continuum. Beyond assessing readiness, this project will also develop the tools needed to undertake the maturity assessment and develop an implementation plan based on the results of the maturity assessment.

Requirements

Living Goods is looking for a consultant or team of consultants to:

A: Develop a maturity model and toolkit to that enables governments to:

Assess the current maturity level of their community mHealth systems in terms of human resources, business processes, technology, and institutional capabilities;

Provide a foundation for future planning;

Support strategic planning; and

B: Work with Living Goods and the MOH in Kenya or Uganda to test / validate the toolkit and use the findings of the test to refine both the model and the toolkit.

The consultant or team of consultants will be expected to:

Understand and document the key lessons learned from Living Goods’ mHealth work as well as the work of other organisations that are implementing digital health at the community level in Africa. This will include:

• Lessons in selecting, designing, and deploying technology for community health
• Lessons in using mobile phones as a tool for data collection, service provision, and decision support for community health care.
• Lessons in providing wrap-around services required to implement digital health at community level
• Develop a user-friendly, maturity model toolkit and methodology (user guides) for MOHs and implementing partners.
• Develop an approach to communicate and share the maturity model tools and publications.
• Develop a tool to enable Living Goods to monitor the success of the maturity model and toolkit over time.

Key Deliverables

• Project Inception Report
• Project plan, including key activities and milestones.
• Refined project deliverable.
• Stakeholder Engagement Summary Findings & Insights
• Summary writeups from interviews and discussions.
• Executive summary of key insights and learnings.
• Maturity Model and validated toolkit
• Draft maturity model toolkit.
• Toolkit testing/validation with the MOH in either Uganda or Kenya (country to be determined).
• Validated maturity model toolkit and associated publications developed.
• Communication and knowledge sharing
• Publication materials and communication strategy
• Lessons learned
• Maturity model and toolkit M&E framework for Living Goods.
• Report including but not limited to:
• Publishable and finalized Word document, including executive summary, table of contents, sources/references, and appendices detailing maturity model for mHealth for Community Health in the test site
• Publishable and finalized Word document, including executive summary, table of contents, sources/references, and appendices summarizing benefits case for mHealth for community health in general.
• A policy brief making the case for a maturity model approach to government implementation of community mHealth solutions.
• Condensed PowerPoint presentation with key slides summarizing the narrative from the publishable report.
• Aside from Living Goods, the primary audience for the deliverables are Ministries of Health in Africa, community health implementing partners, donors/funders interested in digital health technology and primary health care.

Qualification and Essential Skills

Successful applicants will have the following competencies:

• A postgraduate qualification in an area related to healthcare business strategy development, and/or organizational development.
• Experience in the health sector and working directly with governments will be an added advantage
• Over 5 years of experience in conducting similar exercises, preferably in the NGO and/or health sector.
• A demonstrated high level of professionalism and an ability to work independently and in highpressure situations under tight deadlines.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills.
• High proficiency in written and spoken English.
• Deadlinedriven with a focus on results.