Rocket Health

Rocket Health for your Mental Health wellness and care through telepsychiatry and last mile medical services delivery.

Our solution is an end-to-end digitally supported platform called Rocket Health, integrated telehealth and last-mile platform that supports prevention, care and treatment for mental health conditions targeting the youth. The solution consists a 24/7 medical call center staffed by qualified health professionals and counselors that offer remote support to beneficiaries’ inquiries through offline (USSD code, hotline and SMS) and online platforms (https://www.rockethealth.shop/) platforms. Users get to know the platform through media marketing and promotion campaigns and designing and disseminating promotional materials like posters and flyers with instructions on how to access the services. Once a teleconsultation is handled, it is documented in an electronic medical record system to which the client has access for continuity of care beyond the boundaries of Rocket Health. Encounters that necessitate further assessment i.e. laboratory and pharmacy refills are flagged off and get to be delivered at the client’s location of choice through Rocket Health’s last mile laboratory sample pick-up and medicine delivery service. Health content on mental health wellness is developed and translated into local languages and disseminated via mobile SMS in addition to leveraging social media pages for wider reach.

Access to youth-friendly, quality and affordable mental health services.

In Uganda, mental health problems are recognized as a public health challenge contributing 13% to the national disease burden. Depression, anxiety, and elevated stress levels are the most common. According to the World Health Organization report (2017), Uganda, a predominantly young population, is ranked among the top six countries in Africa in rates of depressive disorders while 2.9% live with anxiety disorders with about 5.1% of females and 3.6% of males affected.

The 2018 survey by The Medical Concierge Group in collaboration with MTN Pulse to assess mental health in Uganda indicates that more than half of the 158 respondents had signs of depression, two weeks prior to taking the survey, but could not access the help they needed.

Factors contributing to the problem include structural barriers in the traditional healthcare system such as unfriendly services set-up that raise stigma concerns, drug-supply gaps, low psychiatrist-to-patient ratio and non-functional post-facility support services that often result into high relapse rate.

Consequently, young people may resort to negative coping strategies like drug-abuse, drop out of school, thus juvenile delinquency.

This may further cause loss of productivity and risk a vicious cycle of generational poverty among others.

The situation has been exacerbated by Covid-19 pandemic that has crippled the economy and led to loss of employment, broken the support systems young people were accustomed to (schools, peers, social interactions) and trivialized the contribution of mental health to sustainable development, at a time when the world should be more cognizant of it.

Uganda’s population is relatively young, over 60% is below the age of 30 years. Our target population is an adolescent girl living in a rural area; her family is poor, and finds itself vulnerable to economic, political and environmental shocks. She has a one-in-four risk of becoming pregnant during adolescence, is at high risk of being engaged in early marriage and will likely drop out of school before reaching secondary level. The other is a young woman who survives on daily-wage work, probably supporting a family and living with constant fears and anxiety due to uncertainties of the Covid-19 pandemic that threaten her employment status.

Their situation often has a ripple effect on their mental health, aggravated by a combination of factors: expensive mental health services, unfriendly youth health services, cultural expectations, poor or non functional health systems and community support structures among others.

An end-to-end digitally supported platform that offers mental health wellness messages in a private and confidential way through mobile SMS and toll-free hotline platforms allows the youths to continuously engage with the health system in a less stigmatizing way. The closed group social chat spaces and online e-Shop allows for continued engagement in a secure setting.

Prior to the design and roll-out of the Rocket Health’s mental health support program we did carryout audience consultations and focused group discussions to understand barriers to access and utilization of existing mental health services especially in the peri-urban areas. An online survey we did with MTN-Uganda, a telecom service provider showed that over 38% of respondents did not seek health care due to stigma and lack of access to health information. Link to survey results here. User centered design approaches including focused group discussions with end users revealed the need to design las-mile medical services delivery models that overcome long waiting time and queues at health facilities. Link to focused group discussion findings here. We continually engage with clients and potential users via our social media platforms, here is a customer testimonial on twitter.

We also partner with other civil society organizations to offer outreach community health activities within the impoverished communities in the peri-urban centers where we work.

Rocket Health is currently at the scale-up stage as we have a market-fit model that has been delivering services to customers for the last 3 years. We have attracted partnerships with both private sector players like health insurance companies and developmental partners like USAID with whom we have implemented regional and national public health projects. To date, we pride ourselves on over 2 million teleconsultations annually, 8 private health insurance partnerships with players like UAP-Old Mutual, Liberty, ICEA, Sanlam among others. We have also partnered with academic and research institutions like Makerere University School of Public Health with whom we have implemented a number of institutional review board approved research studies. Our business model is a hybrid of B2B2C, the B2C that involves direct sales of our Rocket health services to customers through one off purchases or through our prepaid health care plans and the B2B2C partnerships with private health insurance companies and developmental partners that cover the costs of health service access for specific demographics who in turn access subsidized or free health services from Rocket health. Thus, we are focusing on measurable growth in users, revenues and market traction to ensure self-reliance and sustainability to create long-term impact.

Rocket health leverages diverse technologies for each of its service fronts as described below;

Teleconsultations: Via the voice platforms are supported by the asteriks an open source software that has been customized to scale with ability to handle over 15 interactions simultaneously. Interactions are documented in electronic medical record systems designed from Laravel (PHP) a web-based programming language for logic; MySQL for database support; HTML that supports the front end web-design and Bootstrap for U.I styling. 

Messaging platform: Developed from Rapidpro an open source software that handles bulk messaging as campaigns and is able to send out reminders.

Online e-shop: Built leveraging Woo-commerce that supports online order management, inventory management and payment gateway integration. In addition, WordPress software has been utilized for content management systems.

In addition, youth friendly social chat spaces like video and messaging platforms are very engaging and are leveraged for health information dissemination and psychosocial peer-peer support.

1. Current number of clients: 1,850,000

2. Projected number of clients in one year: 3,855,000

Uganda currently has a population of about 45 million people and 50% of this population access their healthcare needs including mental health support from private care at an average of 3 encounters a year spending about USD 30 per encounter. If we assume that 70% of outpatient medical encounters are handled through telemedicine given the ease of access, quality and convenience, this gives us a market size of USD 1.6 billion.

Furthermore, over 23 million Ugandans own mobile phones and all these are potential clients for telehealth services.

Our overall goal is to increase equitable access to quality and reliable mental health services especially for the youths in peri-urban settings in Uganda. We shall achieve this through;

1. Improving access to credible mental health information by developing health content on diverse mental health topics including substance abuse and depression, translating it into local languages and disseminating it on mobile phones.

ii.  Reduce risk of relapse among youths with substance and drug abuse through routine follow-up and closed group online safe social chat spaces.

iii. Health services delivery through teleconsultations and last mile medical services delivery via Rocket Health telemedicine and last-mile services.

1. Number of mental health tele-consultations offered. This helps us to measure growth and adaptability of our innovation among the target population.

2. Number of remotely resolved mental health cases. This measures the effectiveness and efficiency of our innovation.

3. Success stories told by the beneficiaries which is a measure of impact of our innovation. This helps us know if our innovation is relevant and causes positive outcomes within the target population.

4. Net Promoter score which is the measure of the likelihood users would refer our services to others which is also a customer satisfaction indicator.

5. Client retention rates which is the measure of rate at which clients reuse Rocket health for their mental health needs.

1. Financial constraints  to hire critical human resources like mental health specialists, counselors and data scientists.

2. Market barriers: Slow onboarding of tele-health model of healthcare delivery by private health insurance providers and some do not cover mental health conditions.

3. Geographical reach: As our current services, especially last-mile deliveries are located within the urban settings of Uganda, awareness and actual service provision for those outside our current radius of operation is a challenge.

4. Cultural barriers and harmful gender stereotypes that stigmatize mental health conditions.

The team at Rocket Health is young, energetic and very innovative and are from diverse career backgrounds with medical professionals, researchers, software engineers, marketing and communications, quality assurance, finance and customer care.

We have garnered a lot of experience in delivering telemedicine services and have received a number of awards and recognitions including the 2021 overall winner of the Start-up Uganda Awards, 2020 Commonwealth digital health awards in the Telecare and Telemedicine category and the Ministry of Health Uganda Heroes in Health awards. Rocket Health has experience in implementing donor funded projects at national level for example the 5 year USAID funded social behavioral change activity. The team is young with the average age at Rocket Health being 26 years, characteristic of the typical target beneficiaries and as such there will be ease in contextualizing solutions to meet needs of the target population. At the center of our mission which is to design solutions that are locally contextualized for local needs is the human centered design approach which we think will ease adoption and use of our solutions.

We partner with the private sector such as insurance companies that cover medical expenses of their clients, research institutions like Makerere University, Infectious Diseases Institute- Uganda to generate evidence and implement evidence-based technology-supported solutions, international development partners like USAID, World Vision, UNICEF with whom we have delivered public health telehealth services to beneficiaries at a greatly subsidized cost. Community participation in our programs is prioritized and actualized through working closely with CBOs and local NGOs. We will collaborate more with government agencies and ministries such as the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Gender Labour and Social Development, Ministry of ICT among others as a holistic approach in addressing social determinants of health