Tools to support eye care service delivery across the Commonwealth
THE CHALLENGE
Access to eye health services is limited in many of the poorest countries in the world. Technological developments in recent decades have the potential to transform eye health. However, many solutions are fragmented, inappropriate for their context, or not supported by high-quality research evidence.
THE SOLUTION
The Consortium has been at the leading edge of developing evidence-based, scalable technology to support better provision of eye health across the Commonwealth. Primarily this has been through Peek Vision, a social enterprise developing software and smartphone-based solutions to improve access to eye health.
Peek started as a research project at the International Centre for Eye Health (ICEH) at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Today it is a thriving social enterprise with a team of over 30 people working with partners across the world. It has been supported by the Consortium since its early years. Peek solutions enable eye health professionals in low-resource settings to strengthen eye health systems through mobile screening and survey technology and real-time data analysis.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Peek technology has been used to screen thousands of children and adults in Botswana, India, Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe. It has received numerous awards and recognition, including winning the “Best Social Impact Start Up in Europe” in 2016 (selected by Google and Mckinsey) and nominated for best social impact app 2017 on the Google Play Store. The African Union’s 2018 All African Public Service Innovation Award was given in recognition of the work led in Kenya.
In addition to supporting the extensive research activity which underpins Peek’s work, the Consortium has enabled Peek and its partners to conduct critical pilot studies and field tests. These have paved the way to large-scale partnership agreements with NGOs and government funded programmes. These programmes are currently getting underway and look set to reach millions of people in the coming years.
Working with ICEH as part of the Consortium, Peek has also developed a new mobile and cloud-based platform for Rapid Assessment of Avoidable Blindness surveys. The new platform includes several new features that deliver higher integrity data and the ability to track RAABs live.
