Adoption barriers for medical technology in Sub Saharan Africa

Abstract

Currently, medical technologies in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are not yet sufficient to provide robust healthcare systems. This is not due to it being unavailable, but due to a large portion of present technologies being non-functional. This non-functionality also causes a lack of adoption of medical technologies. Through a T-shaped case study (e.g. a multiple case study with one case worked out in-depth), current barriers in adoption are uncovered. These are then integrated into an actionable framework that can be used by organizations implementing medical technologies in SSA to uncover barriers applicable to them, as well as proposed mitigating strategies to overcome these barriers. Themes included affecting adoption in this thesis are: maintenance, training, organizational and behavioral change. Barriers discovered can be divided into three categories. The first being resource-barriers, covering time, money, human and materials. Secondly, institutional barriers, covering policy, trust and the need for breaking habits. The last barrier category covers communication between client and organization. The framework offers the possibility to find applicable barriers based upon characteristics of an implementation situation. The implementation situation herein is medical equipment (ME) being implemented by an organization (O) into a client organization (CO). Using the knowledge on barriers in an early stage provides opportunity for the organization to overcome these barriers by informed analysis of mitigating strategies that they could implement.