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Rural Ugandan Village

Reach is delighted to be part of the newly-funded AHA Strategically Focused Research Network (SFRN) on Health Technologies and Innovation. Four research teams from across the United States will form the SFRN and will work on developing breakthrough technology solutions to improve health outcomes related to heart and brain health.

Reach is partnering with the team led by Andrea Beaton, M.D., of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital on the Active Detection and Decentralized Dynamic Registry to Improve Uptake of Rheumatic Heart Disease Secondary Prevention (ADD-RHD) project. The project will concentrate on getting more people living with rheumatic heart disease in Uganda into guideline-based care—using technology to find more people with rheumatic heart disease, keep them in care, and generate the investment case to scale up national rheumatic heart disease action plans in low-income countries.

As a collaborating partner in the project, Reach will coordinate the key engagement of stakeholders to ensure that research conducted is grounded in and guided by a solid understanding of the needs and practical realities on the ground. To help inform research plans and activities, Reach will establish and facilitate input from a core advisory group of Ugandan and global stakeholders. As research outputs from the project become available, Reach will work to communicate the findings in a manner that is relevant, accessible, and makes clear the practical steps needed to translate the evidence into policies and programs.  Research findings will also help our understanding of how technology can be best applied in RF/RHD prevention and management in the future and will have implications for how other countries can optimise their own efforts.

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