THE pandemic has accelerated the pace of technological advances in health care, from video consultations to artificial intelligence-powered triage, and medically underserved East Africa is catching on fast.

With some of the worst doctor-patient ratios in the world, Africa is proving fertile ground for telehealth providers. Babyl, the Rwandan arm of U.K.-based Babylon Healthcare Services Ltd., said daily consultations went from about 3,000 in March 2020 to more than 5,000 now. Rocket Health, a Ugandan provider, saw a 500 percent increase in phone and video consultations in the year to December 2020, and a quadrupling so far this year.

While the demand has been driven by COVID-19, with testing needs and reduced access to health professionals, the companies expect the growth to continue even when the virus has been tamed. Many African countries can’t train enough medical personnel and have to grapple with a persistent brain drain to richer nations. More than a third of U.K. physicians were trained abroad, including in Africa.

“We’ve definitely seen a telehealth explosion,” said Mason Marks, a law professor at the University of New Hampshire and senior fellow at Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center. The world was already “on the cusp of seeing a breakthrough in telehealth but I do think it’s been accelerated probably by at least a few years,” including in places like Africa, he said.

Much of the growth will be fueled by rising smartphone penetration. Only about a quarter of Sub-Saharan Africans had access to smartphones before the pandemic, according to the GSM Association, which represents mobile providers.

Babyl has been in Rwanda since 2015 and said about 20 percent of the population is registered to use its service. Smartphone penetration was around 10 percent when Babylon first entered the country.

(SD-Agencies)