NaviHealth.ai™ : Health Services Locator

There have been large-scale responses by African public and private sectors to the COVID-19 pandemic with the creation of hotlines, local PPE production initiatives and COVID-19 infection control facilities, yet there is information asymmetry precluding access to available COVID-19 testing/treatment facilities and non-COVID-19 essential healthcare services. 

NaviHealth.ai™ is an existing geo-coded directory of healthcare facilities and providers across Africa. In response to the pandemic, we have overlaid onto NaviHealth.ai, an interactive map of African COVID-19 testing laboratories, isolation and treatment centres with the potential to layer on additional assets such bed and oxygen availability. We are also crowdsourcing information to identify non-COVID-19 health services (such as antenatal care) still available to the public as well as local manufacturers of PPE for health workers, businesses and citizens. 

Access to information about COVID-19 services and non-COVID-19 essential services has the potential to save thousands of lives across Africa.

The dissemination of information about the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic varies from country to country, but on average has not been aggregated or served up to citizens on a real-time basis to enable them to make informed decisions about care. To be of benefit, information should be consolidated, updated, comprehensive and easily accessible by the public.

In addition to this, many facilities have paused or limited routine and urgent care services. There have been several reports on the decline in antenatal care and deliveries. We have experienced a dramatic increase in inbound calls and messages to our telehealth platform in the last three months partly due to limited access to in-person care or being turned away at facilities. It is essential that patients know where to get COVID-19 and routine care services when needed.

Lastly, the global shortage in the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE), required by healthcare workers puts them at risk. Though some initiatives have been set up to manufacture PPE locally, there is a lack of easily accessible information about these manufacturers. We are crowdsourcing information on Africa-based manufacturers to share on NaviHealth.ai™ where it can be accessed by those who need it. 

We have expanded the services we offer on our NaviHealth.ai™ platform to include:

·         COVID-19 facilities interactive map: A total number of 344 testing laboratories and 260 isolation/treatment facilities across 44 African countries have been geo-coded and added to NaviHealth.ai™ thus far. Users can access facility-specific information and are provided accurate navigational services. They are guided to call country or state/district hotlines, available in our platform’s directory of COVID-19 hotline numbers, before visiting.

·         Mapping of non-COVID-19 care services: We designed an assessment tool targeted at healthcare service providers to crowdsource information about their facilities, infection control policies and the routine care services they continue to provide. The Healthcare Facility Assessment Tool is available here. Facilities are added after verification, and made available to users.

·         Mapping of local PPE manufacturers: We are also cataloguing local businesses/organizations and initiatives involved in the local production of PPE for healthcare workers and the public. To this end, we have created a data collection tool to crowdsource this information. The PPE Manufacturers Assessment Tool is available here. Manufacturers are verified before having their details added to the listing on NaviHealth.ai™

Our solution is guided by the iterative feedback we have had from the members (patients) and healthcare providers we serve in our network. Through our tele-education webinars for providers and patients, and our telehealth service for people with regular health needs, we have tracked heightened anxiety and concern about healthcare access particularly in vulnerable populations. Our target population includes:

 Public

• People who may concerned they have been exposed to COVID-19 and therefore seek emergency care on where to go 

• Women of reproductive age including those seeking family planning, ante-natal, neonatal or infant care

• People living with NCDs including diabetes, hypertension, cancer, asthma who need more periodic interfaces with the healthcare system (pharmacies, clinics, labs, etc).

• People with non-Covid-19 urgent or emergent healthcare needs

Providers

• Those at greater risk of being infected, i.e., healthcare workers and systems, by making available information of local PPE manufacturers given access to affordable and quality PPE has been interrupted. 

Our objective is to improve the coordination of infection control measures of each country and ensure that every citizen knows where to seek medical care in their community in the event of exposure to the coronavirus or when seeking urgent/routine care.

The genesis for NaviHealth.ai emerged in 2014 when we saw information asymmetry about treatment centres/bed availability affecting lives during the Ebola Outbreak. It was selected as an OpenIdeo winning idea. We understood that a digital platform, accessible to citizens, with information on healthcare services which could be layered with  information during epidemics, was critical for health system resilience.

We are concerned about the long-term safety of Africa and its health workforce. By addressing information asymmetry through a free digital platform, our focus is to build a resilient African healthcare infrastructure that will serve populations for many decades to come.

We provide a tech-driven solution for citizens, providers and facilities by leveraging big data and search to consolidate information about COVID-19/non-COVID-19 healthcare services across the African continent making this readily available for free for users on the already existing NaviHealth.ai™ platform at no cost. To our knowledge, there is no solution that provides this level of information to users in an efficient, highly available and comprehensive way. There is an ever-present need for NaviHealth.ai™ which can be easily adaptable to the contexts of future disease outbreaks or pandemics. The use of crowdsourcing adds to the robustness and reliability of the information available to users on NaviHealth.ai™.

We have been intentional about using technologies that scale. To that end, we have built our platform with a combination of the MERN stack. For the front end, we have used React.js, a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. On the backend, we have used Node.js. For our database architecture, we have used MongoDB due to the multiple advantages it provides such as flexibility, scalability, speed, and high availability. We also use load balancers at various interfaces on the platform, leveraging a distributed architecture  to optimize resources available, improve response time of the platform and prevent overloading of resources. Given the critical nature of the platform, we have ensured that single points of failure have been eliminated from the platform. We also use additional security features provided by third party providers to protect the platform and exposed APIs from DDoS attacks as well as ensure the data is protected. 

To build out the database with information about routine and emergency care services,  we use a crowdsourcing approach coupled with low cost data collection tools  to amplify the reach and comprehensiveness of our solution. These easy-to-fill tools are accessible via links disseminated across social media and networks of healthcare professionals and health organizations. The responses are analyzed, verified and geo-coded before being put on NaviHealth.ai™.

Citizens and providers alike have reported to us they have used the platform to identify and seek care at facilities as well as refer patients for carel. The generation of data from actively engaged contributors, using web platforms and mobile technology, to be made available to users in real time has been proven to have widespread applications in disaster management and risk mitigation. Increases in scale and reach can be achieved with modest increases in funding (Poblet M et al, 2018; available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10796-017-9734-6).

Following the 2010 Haiti and the raised awareness of the lack of adequate coverage by existing mapping platforms to guide relief efforts, the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community, made of global contributors, produced updated mapping services for the island country. The impact of this was that emergency services were able to utilise the OSM map to guide relief efforts (Neis P et al, 2011; available at https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/1/2/146). It is our strongest belief that we can achieve similar results and greater social impact with our NaviHealth.ai™ platform.

Our theory of change is firmly rooted in the belief that individuals can be empowered to make better health decisions and would take more proactive steps in safeguarding their health and the health of their loved ones and communities during the ongoing pandemic if they have access to the health information they need when they need it: 

• Users can access the directory of COVID-19 hotline numbers for COVID-19 screening and get turn-by-turn navigation to the nearest care facility for COVID-19 or non-COVID-19 care when they need it. This eliminates the delays in deciding to seek care and in reaching the healthcare facility. With the added layering of bed availability within the identified healthcare facilities, users will be able to mitigate the delay in receiving care as they will be directed to facilities with the capacity to care for them.

•  Healthcare practitioners can access our listing of PPE manufacturers to purchase PPE required to control the spread of infection within their facilities and to safeguard their health. 

Below is the detailed theory of change that drives our work:

INPUTS

• High-tech Navihealth.ai™ platform

• Crowdsourced data

B1. Information mined and crowdsourced on COVID-19 hotline numbers, testing sites and isolation/treatment centers

B2. Information sourced from healthcare service providers in Africa about essential services availability during the COVID-19 pandemic (and future epidemics)  and lockdown restrictions

B3. Information sourced from PPE local and regional manufacturers in Africa about the safety equipment they produce 

OUTPUTS

- Users

C1. Improved access to information about COVID-19 testing and care facilities 

C2. Improved access to information about available non-COVID-19 care services

C3. Unbroken continuity of care for those with regular health needs

- Healthcare Providers

C4. Strengthened PPE supply chain linkage 

OUTCOMES

D1. Satisfied users with improved knowledge about where to seek care 

D2. Increased access to data about health facilities and services in Africa

D3. Improved capacity of healthcare providers to control or mitigate the spread of COVID-19

D4. Reduced morbidity e.g. control of chronic conditions

D5. Improved sustainability and resilience of the African health systems

D6. Improved population health outcomes e.g. maternal and neonatal health

Currently, the Navihealth™ platform lists over 6k health facilities and 2k healthcare providers spread across Nigeria with additional information for COVID-19 isolation, testing and treatment centres in over 44 African countries. We have built for scale at the onset and will increase the number of data points by 5x at the end of this year. Given Navihealth™ works on the premise of search, it has the potential of serving any community, anytime, anywhere. With the current focus on Nigeria, it has the potential to serve over 200 million health seekers, providers and more.

Since its launch in 2018, there have been over 10k persons who have utilized the services on the platform. With the additional services such as bed and oxygen availability coupled with marketing to create awareness about the capabilities of the platform we envision that by year 5, we would increase the number of facilities available in the DB 20x and subsequently increase the number of users to over 10 million across the continent and beyond.

Year one: We would like to ensure that over 200,000 unique citizens have accessed the directory to help them with decisions to care over the next year

Year two: Over 10 million unique citizens have accessed the directory to help them with decisions to care over the next year

Legal/Regulatory: There are multiple African countries without strategies for collating master facility lists – complete listings of health facilities within their countries. Among those that do have listings, there are issues of standardization of the information and limitations to public access. 

Financial: To effectively scale the navigational services of our platform and visibility of our services and impact, we need impact investors who are willing to invest so that we have capital to effectively create online offline and language options as well as USSD integration to ensure access to greater population numbers as well as AI to enhance search functionality. Lastly we need to invest in large-scale marketing to reach larger populations to drive awareness about the availability of the platform. 

People: To achieve our goals of expanding our services across all 54 African countries would require having a fine balanced of health professionals, software engineers and product managers on the team.

Market: There will be barriers to entry into new dissemination networks and channels for our crowdsourcing activities. In addition to this is the fact that Africa is incredibly diverse linguistically. To this end our data collection tools, which are in English, may need to be translated into multiple languages.

Legal/Regulatory: We are working on identifying partners in the government, and the public and private health sectors that will facilitate either access to these master lists or support our crowdsourcing initiatives to generate the information across the 54 countries in Africa

Financial: We have become very intentional about formulating a fundraising strategy and identifying potential impact investors. We are creating the funnel to support this.

People: Sourcing talent is difficult, but we have support from USAID technical assistance and Ashoka Globalizer to refine our recruitment strategy and organizational strategy.

Market: As English is not the official language of a number of African countries, our data collection tools will be adapted and pretested before use in non-English speaking regions. In addition we will need to engage business development and marketing consultants to delineate our marketing strategy.

Total Number on NaviHealth solution team: 9 

• Full-time Staff: 5
• Part-Time Staff: 2
• Volunteers/Interns: 1
• Contractors: 1

My co-founder and I and our leadership team have the breadth and depth of expertise in healthcare and technology in Africa that is necessary to actualize and drive large-scale measurable improvement in the populations we serve in a financially sustainable way. Our team of seasoned health and technology professionals has been working on driving behavioural change in the context of chronic health needs for the last 3 years in populations with diabetes, hypertension, obesity, cancer and more. We are women-led and over 70% of our team members are women.

Dr Mobisson is a mechanical-engineer (MIT) turned paediatrician (Yale, Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia) with a background in development and consulting. Prior to mDoc, she led the Africa portfolio for the US NGO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement and worked at McKinsey before this. She is an Ashoka Fellow, a Forbes Africa New Wealth Creator, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

I am co-founder and CTO/COO with a background in Electrical Engineering (Temple) and Finance (NYU Stern MBA). I was a General Manager at Wananchi Telecom in Kenya prior to mDoc. We have a robust data and engineering team with machine learning expertise, clinical team with coaches that are poised to help us scale ambitiously. Majority of the team is located in Lagos and Abuja with additional team members in the US, South Africa, Canada and Rwanda

An integrated set of high-tech high-touch solutions requires partnerships to drive co-creation, amplify impact and ultimately achieve population health, improve member satisfaction and reduce costs. At mDoc, we use data, quality improvement and behavioural science to provide a tech-enabled care ecosystem. Our values centre on using evidence-based guidance and public and private partnerships to amplify preventive care to low-income populations. We have partnered with public and private sector to augment impact.

• Public: Ministry of Health, Lagos Research and Innovation Council  - where we work with government facilities to provide support to their patients. Medical and Laboratory and Science Council of Nigeria for verification of labs on navihealth.ai
• Private: Google for SDGs Accelerator, Healthcare Leadership Academy of Africa, Making More Health (Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim) for Social Enterprises, Ashoka Globalizer (Ashoka and Phillips), Private Hospitals and Patient Associations
• Academic: University of New Mexico's Project ECHO to build capability in providers

We leverage a B2B2C model where NaviHealth.ai™ serves as one pillar of a broader 4-pillar strategy for providing an integrated end to end care solution for people with regular and chronic health needs. While our our services generate revenue, our goal for revenue generation from NaviHealth.ai™ is to drive revenue growth through ads as well as monetizing the sale of aggregated insights to corporate entities.

To date, we have leveraged revenue generated from our other products, awards and grants to refine and grow our NaviHealth.ai™ platform. We are now positioned for aggressive scaling-up which requires impact investment and the formation of strong partnerships with organisations eager to contribute to sustainable social impact in the Africa health system. While we have accepted grants, it is just as important to us to demonstrate continued social impact at scale as it is to show a viable business model, not dependent on grants. We expect to break even by 2022.

At mDoc Healthcare, we are committed to creating sustainable social impact by using advancements in technology to solve the long-standing systemic issues in the healthcare systems of African countries. To achieve our mission and the coverage of our mapping and navigation services, we would appreciate the support and guidance of the Solver community and mentors.

A crucial part of our work requires identifying and building stronger partnerships and networks to expand our coverage and information crowdsourcing activities. Thus, being an MIT Solver would be a valuable opportunity to make connections with potential partners in the Solve Community and be a part of a large global network. Thus, we can improve visibility on the services we provide. In addition to this, we would have access to investments to increase the size of our user base, improve user experience, scale up our services and contribute, as part a Solver team, to a greater social impact.

When we first started mDoc, advisors told us we were running four companies, but we understood that we had to build an integrated healthcare navigation platform for African facilities and providers to address the dearth of information of healthcare services in Africa. Now that we are clear on our platform and business model, we need funding to drive scale. We're keen to identify impact investors in the Solver network and utilise the support from the Solve community of experts.

To scale, we need rock-stars in our team who are curious, problem-solvers, who put people first yet are as eager as we are to demonstrate a profitable pan-African digital healthcare navigation platform at scale. We would like support in helping determine how to recruit them.

We would also love to collaborate with the Solve community to explore the different ways of disseminating our assessment tools for crowdsourcing and identifying implementing partners.

We are eager to work with MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) to determine the most efficient and effective strategies for increasing the reach and range of services provided by the NaviHealth.ai™ platform through scaling digital partnerships with organisations committed to strengthening the African health system. We are particularly keen to learn from Barbara Wixom because of her expertise in data monetization, the utilization of data and analytics to generate revenue for the platform. We are determined to develop a data monetization strategy that is focused on using analytics and insights to drive value for our services among our users/customers, guide our processes and generate direct revenue to ensure the sustainability of our services. 

The incorporation of complex machine learning technology into our healthcare navigation service to effectively match users with appropriate healthcare providers would drive efficiency in our processes. To this end, we would be very interested in learning from the expertise of Professor John Guttag of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s (CSAIL) Data Driven Inference Group. Furthermore, given that CSAIL researchers have launched the “COVID-19 Hospital Status” app that provides real-time updates on the availability of resources at hospitals in the USA using crowdsourced information, we believe that CSAIL is uniquely positioned to provide insight to guide our crowdsourcing initiatives.

We are also eager to partner with BMGF, Save the Children amongst other Solver partners to potentially reach their grantees and partners that support healthcare providers that can upload information on services to the platform.

At mDoc Healthcare, we are committed to using advancements in technology to solve the long-standing systemic issues in the healthcare systems of African countries. We have worked at building an integrated care model that optimizes the end to end experience for people by harnessing quality improvement methods (lean, six sigma), data, behavioural science and technology. During this pandemic, we have been able to be agile and responsive to meet the needs of the citizens and healthcare providers we serve but we need increased investment to ensure that we can effectively scale. We built the foundation of what became NaviHealth in 2014 at night and on a weekend (when we were still working at other jobs) because it was so clear that the information that was needed on Ebola treatment centers and bed availability was not getting in the hands of those who needed it the most - the citizens. We knew then we had to change that and we have been working hard to ensure that access to health information that can potentially save lives is in the hands of people that need it. If selected as an Elevate Prize winner, we will be able to harness the mentorship, the network, support and funding to ensure that we expand our coverage and information crowdsourcing activities.  

At mDoc Healthcare, we are committed to using advancements in technology to solve the long-standing systemic issues in the healthcare systems of African countries. We have worked at building an integrated care model that optimizes the end to end experience for people by harnessing quality improvement methods (lean, six sigma), data, behavioural science and technology. During this pandemic, we have been able to be agile and responsive to meet the needs of the citizens and healthcare providers we serve but we need increased investment to ensure that we can effectively scale. We built the foundation of what became NaviHealth in 2014 at night and on a weekend (when we were still working at other jobs) because it was so clear that the information that was needed on Ebola treatment centers and bed availability was not getting in the hands of those who needed it the most - the citizens. We knew then we had to change that and we have been working hard to ensure that access to health information that can potentially save lives is in the hands of people that need it. We are part of the inaugural class of Google for Startups: Sustainable Development Goals where we have been inculcated in the use of the principles of ML and AI to improve  efficiencies in search and the intent of our users. We have just hired our first fully dedicated ML engineer who specializes in Deep Learning. If selected as an  AI for Humanity Prize winner, we will be able to harness the mentorship, the network, support and funding to ensure that we expand our coverage and information crowdsourcing activities.

At mDoc Healthcare, we are committed to using advancements in technology to solve the long-standing systemic issues in the healthcare systems of African countries. We have worked at building an integrated care model that optimizes the end to end experience for people by harnessing quality improvement methods (lean, six sigma), data, behavioural science and technology. During this pandemic, we have been able to be agile and responsive to meet the needs of the citizens and healthcare providers we serve but we need increased investment to ensure that we can effectively scale. We built the foundation of what became NaviHealth in 2014 at night and on a weekend (when we were still working at other jobs) because it was so clear that the information that was needed on Ebola treatment centers and bed availability was not getting in the hands of those who needed it the most - the citizens. We knew then we had to change that and we have been working hard to ensure that access to health information that can potentially save lives is in the hands of people that need it. With the People's Prize support, we will be able to ensure that we reach more people in our journey to achieve the SDGs and ensure they have access to the care they need for better health.