Health is wealth
Primary health care is a cornerstone of health care systems across the globe. The majority of a person’s health needs—physical, mental, and social—are addressed by primary health care. Primary health care attends not only to individuals and families but also to the overall well-being of communities and their populations. Despite its foundational role in communities everywhere, primary health care remains out of reach for millions of people, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Barriers such as high cost, lack of access, insufficient availability, and inconsistent quality of care hold back people from living healthy and productive lives. Improvements to primary health care are already happening in transformational ways: people are living longer; funding and incentives for high-quality care are on the rise; training and development for health care workers has renewed focus; and access to preventive health care and immunizations are improving patient health outcomes.
Despite having strong measurement standards, limitations in how performance measurement occurs are common. These include:
Lack of comprehensive vision and purpose for data collection;
Poor quality or impractical data;
Measurement that primarily informs funders rather than practical performance improvements;
Inconsistent connectivity and adoption of real-time digital tools;
Information or data systems that do not communicate with others;
Burden of data collection being borne by frontline health workers; and
Systems lack feedback mechanisms for data collectors themselves.
Our platform Health is wealth provides solutions that stand to advance the way that primary health care performance improvement happens in low- and middle-income countries.
Rural India with high burden of diseases confronts critical shortage of health workforce that poses significant challenge in rural healthcare delivery. Various studies reveal the consistent deficit of health workers across the rural terrains, where one doctor serves a community averaging 19,000 people. This gap in services is attributed to lack of training, placement, and retention strategy where solutions are often implemented in silos rather than community responsive. Realizing the unmet demands of health workforce in last mile community, Health is wealth has developed a cloud based platform called Wireless Health Incident Monitoring System(WHIMS) which is designed with an intuitive graphics user interface that even a rural health worker, with basic education can effectively use. Accompanied with WHIMS and Medic Bags, these CHWs are strategically placed by Health is wealth across different care delivery modes to perform household visits, community level health camps, and facility based hub clinics.
Household visits: The CHWs visit households of the rural patients with integrated Point-of-Care devices (POC) supported by WHIMS to screen, monitor and capture basic vitals, without manual error. In fringe areas, WHIMS offer the capability to capture data in offline mode, and update in the cloud server in online mode. This data stored on the cloud is available to remote doctors for diagnosis, monitoring and assisting tertiary referral. An internal trigger in the app alert CHWs of the potential high risk health conditions, through which they are able to counsel, forewarn and prepare the patient for appropriate medical intervention. Information and awareness on regular antenatal checkup, nutritional counselling, and screening for high risk pregnancy and development delays in children (0-2 years) are also made available through these CHWs at household levels.
Health camps: The CHWs with medical staff are made available at pre-arranged sites (spokes) to provide general doctor consultation with basic medicines and offer referral of patients/subjects to Obstetrician & Gynecologists'(s) and Pediatrician(s) as a part of Maternal and Child Health Services. These camps offer counselling and conduct awareness building program through certified doctors to sensitize patients on health and nutrition practices, water, sanitation and hygiene issues. it promotes care-seeking behavior among community, bring down cost of care and distance travelled for seeking care and save wage day’s loss.
Hub Clinic: Health is wealth’s CHWs also offer diagnostic services at hub clinics assist telemedicine services and act as the referral point to assist tertiary linkages. Critical patients are seamlessly escalated to tertiary care utilizing Health is wealth’s strong hospital partnerships. Health is wealth’s CHWs disseminate IEC/BCC messages through mobile phones of its beneficiaries. WHIMS platform can send automated nudges to inform and educate patients. The CHWs collects revenue against different set of services which includes services obtained through diagnostic facility, pathology tests, nutritional supplements, issuing of digital health cards, medicines and tertiary linkages. The model leverages technology to multiple. The availability of doctors in rural India, achieved through community health workers that communicate electronically with urban doctors, enables awareness, advocacy and actions for health, and brings sustained impact in socio-economic outcomes at the village level
Health is wealth has developed cloud based platform called Wireless Health Incident Monitoring System(WHIMS) designed with an intuitive graphics user interface that rural health workers, with basic education can use. WHIMS is accompanied with instruments to measure vital statistics of patients, and for it to be a more reliable diagnostic tool, Health is wealth created Medic Bags with low-cost POC instruments to measure basic statistics. WHIMS is loaded and employed to diagnose patients in remotest areas. The diagnostics are shared in real-time with doctors in these hospitals, who suggest treatments and prescribe medication through WHIMS to CHWs, who relay this information to the patients.
Health is wealth will select 240 village women and 60 male members from districts of West Midnapore, Bankura and Purulia, in West Bengal, India and train them for a duration of 576 hours over 3 months period (8hours/day) to become CHWs. It will build the capacity of these CHWs through integrated technology training where each health activist will serve 5000 populations, impacting 1.5 million rural populations within 2 years of deployment.
The solution brings technology innovations, scalable model and ecosystem partnership of multiple-stakeholders from community members in the grassroots up to the highest level of the Government to build an integrated care delivery model that is both inclusive and community responsive.
The solution serves three sections of the community; youth population to develop capacity and skills to earn livelihood locally, women community to earn income and respect, and village community members to benefit from improved primary healthcare delivery model.
The solution serves three sections of the community; youth population to develop capacity and skills to earn livelihood locally, women community to earn income and respect, and village community members to benefit from improved primary healthcare delivery model.
We aim to scale up the inclusive model leveraging the captive customer base of Health is wealth and other partners in the network across 20 districts in 5 different states in India and empower 2000 CHWs within 5 years of deployment of the initiative.
To expand the reach of the care delivery model, the initiative through CHWs will work through different delivery modes. At an household level, CHWs will provide antenatal checkup, nutritional counseling, and screening for high risk pregnancy and development delays in children (0-2 years), through health camps, the village community will get access to information and awareness on health, sanitation and awareness and through hub clinics, the community through CHWs will get access to tertiary referral care. Through different touch points, established by these CHWs, the rural and remotest community will get access to integrated care at reduced cost and distance
Health is wealth project team comprises of experienced health information, monitoring & evaluation specialist, medical experts and a software engineer drawn from multi-sector organizations (Nasarawa State Primary Healthcare Development Agency, Data Colab) that can influence and build necessary collaborations and engagements. The Symptor development team is located at Lafia in Nasarawa state Nigeria, at the implementation community.
The aggregate experiences of the team members across healthcare projects has vastly engaged with the community and stakeholders in understanding patient need and usability in building usability and partnerships. Having worked with understanding health data requirements at different levels, the team has worked with caseworkers, frontline health workers and primary healthcare centers in the region to understand and integrate a suitable workflow into Symptor.
In addition, we are engaging digital transformation principles in co-designing of Symptor with all stakeholders taking peculiarities of technological exposure of potential users, usability, and familiarity of process flow with Symptor workflow.
Health is wealth Platform is designed to promote human-centered values perfectly. We are transitioning from a conventional “one size fits all” education model to an active, personalized “learner-centered” model. Everyone is in charge of their own learning. Using Planet Learning, everyone, with any device that can open a browser, has a personal dashboard with the things they are reading or watching, the courses they are taking, the learning teams in which they are participating and a record of their ongoing learning achievements. Furthermore, all learners are strongly encouraged to create and share their own resources, including their essays, stories, artwork and music.
Health is wealth Planet Learning is personalized, scalable, and deployable at low cost. Used in our Community Learning Centers, it offers disadvantaged youth large quantities of multi-media resources and self-paced career pathways in education, healthcare, entrepreneurship, ICT, food and agriculture, and public safety, that easily combine with local content and needs. Periodically, linked to the Internet, the system offers updates and connection responsive to changing circumstances. It works primarily off the internet on any device that can open a browser. The system can be contained in a small wheeled suitcase, or backpack, and be up and running in less than a minute.
- Employ unconventional or proxy data sources to inform primary health care performance improvement
- Pilot
Our Digital platform-Health is wealth is the solution that Address the solutions that stand to advance the way that primary health care performance improvement happens in low- and middle-income countries.
Primary health care as a cornerstone of health care systems across the globe. The majority of a person’s health needs—physical, mental, and social—are addressed by primary health care. Primary health care attends not only to individuals and families but also to the overall well-being of communities and their populations.
Despite its foundational role in communities everywhere, primary health care remains out of reach for millions of people, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Barriers such as high cost, lack of access, insufficient availability, and inconsistent quality of care hold back people from living healthy and productive lives.
Our Digital platform-Health is wealth provides Improvements to primary health care and are already happening in transformational ways: People are living longer; funding and inceptives for high quality care are on the rise training and development for health care workers has renewed focus; and access to preventive health care and immunizations are improving patient health outcomes.
While performance improvement systems vary around the world, using Health is wealth for measuring primary health care performance improvement are on hand Despite having strong measurement standards, limitations in how performance measurement occurs are common. These include:
Lack of comprehensive vision and purpose for data collection.
Poor quality or impractical data.
Measurement that primarily informs funders rather than practical performance improvements.
Inconsistent connectivity and adoption of real-time digital tools.
Information or data systems that do not communicate with others.
Burden of data collection being borne by frontline health workers; and
Systems lack feedback mechanisms for data collectors themselves.
For progress to continue, diverse health care stakeholders, including patients, frontline health workers, policymakers, and everyone in between, need the means to understand what’s working well and where further improvements are needed. While key indicators to measure the improvement of primary health care performance already exist, improvements and innovation are still urgently needed.
The solution brings technology innovations, scalable model and ecosystem partnership of multiple-stakeholders from underserved community members in the grassroots up to the highest level of the Government to build an integrated care delivery model that is both inclusive and community responsive.
The solution serves three sections of the community; youth population to develop capacity and skills to earn livelihood locally, women community to earn income and respect, and village community members to benefit from improved primary healthcare delivery model.
Health is wealth has developed cloud based platform called Wireless Health Incident Monitoring System(WHIMS) designed with an intuitive graphics user interface that rural health workers, with basic education can use. WHIMS is accompanied with instruments to measure vital statistics of patients, and for it to be a more reliable diagnostic tool, Health is wealth created Medic Bags with low-cost POC instruments to measure basic statistics. WHIMS is loaded and employed to diagnose patients in remotest areas. The diagnostics are shared in real-time with doctors in these hospitals, who suggest treatments and prescribe medication through WHIMS to CHWs, who relay this information to the patients.
Over the next 12 months we seek to partner with leading NGOs that work with community health workers to build an adapted version of Health is Wealth, which will be tested and deployed at the field. Our key objective will be to achieve proof of concept among CHWs and drug shop dispensaries for our solution. This entails testing, deploying and validating our solution together with strong partners on the ground. Our focus will be on Sub-saharan Africa.
We want to make it easy for anyone, anywhere to access trusted medical expertise and high-quality care, tailored to their individual needs. Our vision is to empower patients and frontline health workers to take better informed health decisions and to enable access to appropriate and timely care in LMIC. Over the next 3-5 years we seek to reach over 20 Million people, directly as Health is wealth users as well as indirectly through frontline health workers. In addition, we aim to impact lives positively, through the use of patient analytics and aggregated, real-time populations insights, which allow for effective outbreak control.
we are currently working on a pilot with Village Health Workers (VHWs) in partnership with Federal Medical Center Keffi, Nasarawa State, Nigeria, in two communities in Nigeria. Here, our partners have integrated pre-assessment quizzes of all courses and are working with surveys for the purpose of gathering health baseline data as well, all within the Planet Learning system. Additionally, By partnering with relevant health worker organizations in LMIC, we strive to create an adapted version of Health is wealth for community health workers and drug shop dispensaries to improve decision-making, as well as introduce an effective referral system across stakeholders within primary healthcare, benefitting millions of people, especially Underserved women and children by 2030
Our theory of change includes embracing variability in Providing access to improvement of primary health care performance in low- and middle-income countries, clinical research for those currently underserved in low- and middle-income countries, supporting medical providers to strengthen health systems in vulnerable communities worldwide, connecting physicians and healthcare providers worldwide, building relationships, collaborations, and share resources to improve patient health and long-term outcomes.
To achieve this, we are currently working on a pilot with Village Health Workers (VHWs) in partnership with Nasarawa State University Nigeria in two communities in Nigeria. Here, our partners have integrated pre-assessment quizzes on all courses and are working with surveys for the purpose of gathering baseline data as well, all within the Planet Learning system. Additionally, we are developing a proposed pilot for Somalia that employs Planet Learning to help Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya to become “Ready to Return” and, at the same time, provides the conditions in selected Somali communities that enable them to become “Peace Building Communities” functioning as “magnets” for the Ready to Return refugees in Dadaab. Tracking improvement with baseline data is essential in this six to twelve month development program to prepare Somali refugees to become skilled in a trade or service as team member in a Peace Building Community.
Health is wealth works with nation-based organizations that are irrationally committed to scaling highly effective learning for all of their people, especially the disadvantaged. We work closely with our partners to ensure that the improvements in learning that are demonstrated and documented to be highly effective are scaled to everyone throughout their country. Over the past decade Health is wealth and its partners have served 50,000 learners in more than 100 communities in Nepal, Ghana, Kenya and Uganda, and with Syrian and Somali refugees in Jordan and Kenya. We hope, by 2027, to be supporting a powerful network of 100 such nation-based public-private partnerships
The core technology that powers our solutions Health is wealth-The healthcare delivery model
The initiative will develop a strong product supply chain system to scale up the inclusive solution to meet the wide diversity of needs (both health and lifestyle products) of the rural underserved populations and help CHWs to break even. Leveraging the methodical livelihood generation schemes offered by iKure(through the above listed revenue streams), these CHWs will promote various products and services through mobile based supply chain application and make them accessible to all even in hard-to-reach communities. Furthermore through strategic partnership with key supporting organizations, across sectors such as businesses, NGOs, philanthropists, and academia, the existing ecosystem partnership of iKure will play a pioneering role in business development, customer acquisitions and building on a robust network in respective community.
- A new application of an existing technology
- Ancestral Technology & Practices
- Crowd Sourced Service / Social Networks
- Software and Mobile Applications
- 3. Good Health and Well-being
- Nigeria
- India
Health care involves a diverse set of public and private data collection systems, including health surveys, administrative enrollment and billing records, and medical records, used by various entities, including hospitals, CHCs, physicians, and health plans.Data on race, ethnicity, and language are collected, to some extent, by all these entities, suggesting the potential of each to contribute information on patients or enrollees.Community health workers are front-line providers of care for underserved and disadvantaged groups (Taylor, 2004) and therefore are good settings for implementing quality improvement strategies aimed at reducing racial and ethnic disparities in care.while CHCs serve diverse patient populations and, as organizations, understand the importance of demographic data for improving the quality of care, the accuracy of the race, ethnicity, and language data they collect may be limited (Maizlish and Herrera, 2006). More than 87 percent of surveyed CHCs reported inquiring about a patient's need for language services, and 73 percent reported recording this information in the patient record (Gallegos et al., 2008); less is known, however, about the extent to which CHCs consistently collect patient race and ethnicity data beyond the basic Office of Management and Budget (OMB) categories included in their national Uniform Data System.
- Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Our organization was founded on a simple premise—that people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live a healthy, productive life. We are working toward a future that is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive for all.
In 2021, we published our diversity, equity, and inclusion Commitment Statement(The ability to enjoy good health, secure greater educational outcomes, and move and stay out of poverty is unimpeded by race, gender, or other human differences, we will be living in that future) and developed our first diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategic framework, which lays out our plans for achieving transformational outcomes through increased diversity of talent, equitable practices, and an inclusive culture. The framework aims for systemic change across four pillars: Leadership Accountability, Talent, Culture, and Partnerships & Voice.
We believe that we simply cannot achieve our desired impact without focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion internally and with our partners. This begins with taking an earnest look at our shortcomings as well as our accomplishments.
When we talk about DEI, we mean:
- Diversity: a broad array of differences in identity, perspective, skill, and style
- Equity: practices and policies that are just, transparent, and consistent
- Inclusion: an environment that actively welcomes, connects, and values all while harming none
In spite of being a small team, our company culture aims to consciously develop a team that’s diverse in representation (in terms of gender/sexual orientation, language, religion, race, caste, age-group and experience). We believe this is the only way to ensure our work and products are both accessible and joyful for each individual - no matter who they are or where they come from.
We employ multiple approaches to ensure we remain diverse and inclusive, in both thought and action. For instance, when we launched our latest hiring cycle; we purposefully promoted each opening across platforms that cater to/offer opportunities to marginalized communities. Recently, we also recruited a specially-abled person as an intern on our team. Further, our newest learning resource Gen eARTh offers audio-visual storytelling experiences which have been translated into the Indian Sign Language (ISL) to promote accessibility. While we have already begun including issues of Social Justice like gender equity and climate action within our resources, going forward, we intend to make our resources as accessible as possible by offering learning experiences that are multilingual and translated into sign language.
Our Business model:
We’ve grown word of mouth from Patients to Patients with zero marketing budget in the last 2 years showing that there is a market need for Talking Points. Our cost of customer acquisition has therefore been 0. If you’re a Hospital or Hospital district or any other institution, we charge to be on our platform through software licensing fees - on a per Patients basis for the year. Our revenue has grown so far without a sales team and solely driven by inbound requests, and we believe that this can grow this significantly in the next 5 years through outbound sales and with more resources devoted to it and a coherent sales strategy. Despite being a non-profit, 15% of our operating budget was via earned income (v. 10% in 2016), our 2025 goal is to reach 20%, and by 2030 to 50%.
The healthcare delivery model offers various Business model streams to make it self-sustainable in the long run which includes:
- Doctor’s consultation fees
- Issuing of Digital health cards
- Services obtained through diagnostic facility
- Services obtained through Pathology lab
- Telemedicine Services
- Services obtained by CHWs for door step healthcare delivery
- Power testing, selling of eye glasses, medicines and nutritional supplements
- Services obtained through tertiary linkages
We also have other revenue models
- loan fees on top for loans requested,
- 1% withdrawal fees by healthcare providers
- 1% Cost of Funds payable by the bank
- Commission from direct mobile money payments
With all these channels of revenue, we will breakeven within 15 months with our initial investment of USD 500,000. We will then generate a profit of about USD 200,000 within the next 6 months with a high growth rate. This profit will then be injected back into the business for expansion and growth to other potential markets
- Individual consumers or stakeholders (B2C)
Our organizational strategy is to build Partners through sustained donations and grants from NGOs and Business Angels , selling products and services to Patients, service contracts to governments, raising investment capital in the one hundred nations. The ultimate goal is to achieve sustainability by enabling Our Organization to support themselves financially in innovative ways. We also plan to becoming financially sustainable through below services:
- Doctor’s consultation fees
- Issuing of Digital health cards
- Services obtained through diagnostic facility
- Services obtained through Pathology lab
- Telemedicine Services
- Services obtained by CHWs for door step healthcare delivery
- Power testing, selling of eye glasses, medicines and nutritional supplements
- Services obtained through tertiary linkages
Health is Wealth continues to secure funding from private foundations, individual donations and bilateral government grants. Since commencing operations we have raised almost $3.9 million to research, pilot and grow our solution. We have over twenty foundation partners that currently fund our work and have received a bilateral grant from the Canadian Government.
From 2017-2019 we have raised a total $8.4 million to scale our program, reaching 100,000 African women with depression across two countries. We will further diversify our funding streams ensuring that high-net-worth individuals and bilateral grants each make up 20% of our total revenue, with the remaining 60% of financial support obtained from new and existing foundation partners.
Mr