WellaHealth

Rapid convenient malaria care for urban Africans

John is a 25 year old shop assistant that lives in Lagos, Nigeria. He woke up one day with a slight fever and malaise. Unbeknownst to him, he'd been bitten by a mosquito days earlier. Having a busy day ahead of him, he shrugged of his malaise and went to work. He continued this way for a few days as he couldn't afford to take an unpaid day to spend the required hours in a clinic to get tested and treated for malaria. He progressively got worse until he couldn't muster any strength to get out to work anymore. Finally he gave in and ended up going to a clinic where he required intra-muscular injections for a bad malaria infection. He ended up taking 3 days off work to be treated and recover. 

John's case is one of the 82 million cases of malaria that occur annually in Nigeria. Like John, many young Nigerians when they first feel unwell, put of accessing healthcare due to the inconvenience, cost and time it takes to access care. Our solution enables John and millions like him to easily access a rapid malaria testing and treatment service at locations near them at an affordable price. Our innovation is in the creation of a novel digital marketplace that connects people to local rapid health facilities where trained professionals deliver a quality malaria service in 10 minutes or less. We provide digital technology, training, procurement, a referral network and logistic support to make sure the care and follow up is of high quality. This means John and millions like him can get malaria care early and avoid lost income from days off work. Furthermore, we use mobile tech to follow up John and help him stay healthy and malaria free with our personalized health content. 

Malaria costs Nigeria over $1.2 billion and kills hundreds of thousands annually. Our solution makes malaria care more accessible, saves lives and increases productivity. It creates an accessible connected network via which quality healthcare can be delivered to millions of people. 

We are applying existing digital technology and communication to the way malaria care is accessed, recorded and monitored. We use android apps, SMS and cloud based technology to make it happen. This creates a new process that can scale quality malaria care to millions more people. 

People may find us via social media and facebook's free basics. They can book the service via our website our using whatsapp. We collect their phone numbers and use SMS and voice calls to direct, coordinate their care and follow them up. On the the provider side, we provide and android application to manage the care they provide, deliver education and refer to other providers. 

We have succeeded up until now in building our network to include 300 health care locations and 20,000 patients. Our goal is to deliver our malaria care service to over 100,000 Nigerians over the next 12 months and create a scalable repeatable process we can replicate across other African countries.

We plan to be in multiple African countries in the next 3-5 years. Congo being our next target and other similarly high malaria incidence countries. We envision grow rapidly to reach millions of Africans, prevent deaths and reduce malaria incidence.

We see ourselves expanding to include other conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that afflict urban dwellers and can be easily handled in non doctor led or clinic based locations. We are confident that we will reduce the malaria burden in Africa and will be able to use our network expertise to face these new chronic disease epidemics.

We reach our customers through partnerships with community based organizations, cooperatives and local businesses. We also do regular outreaches to educate potential customers and provide them with useful health content. 

Social media is another channel we've used well. We've leveraged facebook's business tools to reach the 20 million Nigerians that are on it. Particularly fruitful has been its free basics platform via which people can find us easily and engage with our service. We have presence via several other channels that make us accessible anytime of the day.

Retention is done via SMS based health content marketing and reminders. 

We've had SMS contact with about 20,000 patients via our health content and reminder platform. Currently, they are able to receive content that helps them modify their behavior to more healthy ones. This is being manifest in healthier lifestyles and less disease complications. 

In 12 months, we plan to be serving over 100,00 people.

Within 3 years, we expect that number to be 1 million in at least 3 countries. We expect to see a reduction in the cases of malaria in the people we serve. This is borne out by the research that shows that testing, treating and providing education on prevention as well as access to preventive materials results in this reduction.

We plan to provide evidence for this improvements by administering regular surveys to our users bench marked against standard data of non-users across the areas we serve. 

Our team has expertise in healthcare via a vastly experienced internal medicine physician. We are also skilled in human centered design and technology and process development. We have community building skills and are able to build consensus and create win win solutions for people we work with. Finally, we are a passionate and likable bunch that are inspired by the personal failings in healthcare we've experienced. 

We work with private providers and as customers come in to via us to pay, we take a commission off every customer payment. We also sell some consumables to the providers and provide logistic support that they pay for. This positions us nicely to be sustainable and scale relatively easily.

We would like access to the global exposure solve provides for mentoring and partnerships. A prime example is being able to connect directly to malaria RDT kit and drug suppliers to gain better pricing for kits and drugs and reduce costs for customers. This will allow us go target even lower income people.  We also see a role in solve supporting and connecting us to resources that will enable us to expand to Francophone Africa where we have little experience. Finally we believe Solve can provide us the needed exposure we need to access capital to scale our work. 

We have limited access to capital to 

1. Activate more cities, 
2. Reduce our cost through bulk purchasing and 
3. Improve awareness of our service. 

There is limited knowledge in the market of our service so lots of our effort is spent in educating people and attempting to stay top of mind. We believe Solve can help us access the networks and resources we need to overcome these barriers.