TCare

Better healthcare at the tap of your button. 

Kenyans each day encounter congested public hospitals contributed by paper based records and administrative based electronic health records. Altogether they are forced to go for treatment with sharing equipments and facilities. According to Kenya Integrated Household Budget Survey(KIHBS) 2015/2016 more than 1/2 of Kenyans, 25million, who walk more than 5km to get to a health facility. Moreover, at the hospital they have to wait for up to 1 or 2 hours to be attended to, hence 5 million delayed diagnosis of common diseases that leads to about 50,000 deaths each year. Our solution is to provide a platform that guarantees treatment to patients at once based on their ailment to the nearby hospital with available capacity. TCare allows hospitals to sign up with our software while patients simply connect to the USSD in their feature phones. The software works by remotely monitoring and controlling data from the hospital capacity by a machine learning algorithm. Our platform then provides real time data and analytics to provide personalized recommendations to patients about available units, facilities and physicians. Patients simultaneously, can then access treatment at once based on their ailment and location. Our solution aims to facilitate patient acquisition in public and private hospitals to effect universal health coverage goal of shared costs by connecting disparate groups in populations. This will enable better health delivery and enhance better health records for disease surveillance both at individual and populations level. 

TCare is developed on top of mobile technology to connect patients to the nearest and affordable health facility through use mobile phone location data by tracking population movements, which helps to predict diseases in patients and identifies centres for treatments based on the availability of a doctor once they send a request through a USSD and mobile applications. This gives insight into the best areas to offer treatment and allows movement restrictions to be put in place when necessary. Once in the hospital, patients grant doctors access to the data for analysis and treatment via SMS on the online dashboard.

Every year, 11 million Africans fall into poverty due to high out-of-pocket payments for healthcare, a WHO report 2016. Achieving universal health coverage - including access to essential health services, medicines and vaccines for all - is one of 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the world’s governments in 2015 and intended to be met by 2030. TCare platform, covers everything from telephone helplines and text message appointment, locating hospitals, electronic health registers, online learning for staff and a secure health records data management platform. 

Over the next 12 months we hope to have reduced maternal deaths significantly during delivery with prompt care through our platform. Our major goal being also to increase the number of patients seeking health services by 30% especially in the informal settlement.

In 3 years, we envision TCare facilitating patient acquisition and eventually effect universal health coverage in all the 47 counties across Kenya, that means ensuring everyone can obtain the health services they need without suffering financial hardship to pay for them.

We aim to be in 5 countries over the next five years. We aim at Rwanda, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria. 

We partner with local mobile operators with a countrywide subscriber of using mobile phones.  

Our selling proposition is B2C through certified partners who are keen on disseminating healthcare like Ministry of Health (MOH) Kenya and World Health Organization (WHO). Once we sign up our software with hospitals, our market findings suggest maternal subscriptions equates to 2 - 4 beneficiaries relative to paternal side on a 3:1 ratio. 

We are currently testing the solution to validate the market with the feedback from paying customers from the two on-boarded health facilities with a pipeline of 300 users in the informal settlement.

In 2019, we will begin the scaling program after having full traction where we will offer extensions on our platform to location based services that facilitate health delivery like cab services and affordable mobile insurance plans like m-tiba and riziki that connect disparate groups in populations. We hope to sign up to 15 major hospitals and acquire 200,000 users. By 2022, we are targeting 1million users and to span our software across 1000 health facilities thereby growing our revenues to 4.5million USD on a 50% annual growth.

1. Collins Imbenzi - strategist and visionary in business development. Keen interests in data and analytics in healthcare.

2. Humphrey Ichingwa - Co-Founder and CTO, Bsc Computer Science, Periyar University in India. Deep background in cyber security and software engineering.

3.  Victor Shikoli - Advisory Board, Co-Founder and COO, HydroIQ . Victor brings in experience in start-up development as an alumnus and 1st Cohort of U.S based accelerator, Techstars Paris Accelerator.

Together with USSD feature and a mobile application for smartphones. Our business generates revenue  by collecting 20% commission of the hospital treatment cost on individual transactions when hospitals acquire through our platform. The funds are disbursed using smart contracts through blockchain secure transactions for accountability and record keeping.

An opportunity to raise funding, we need capital to  carry out product implementation to scale our product in order to sign up hospitals and customers across Kenya and later scale the solution across Africa. We shall also be adding more features to allow patients access better health services.

The main challenge would be raising capital to meet the expansion costs, especially development of the mobile application. To overcome these, we are in the process of identifying development partners with whom we can establish a financing partnership to offset the development costs.