Impeelo Health

Impeelo health is a medical health records startup that allows patients to manage their medical information and history, allowing medical practitioners access to make informed decisions diagnosis.

Medical errors due to inefficient health record management and sharing has been costly in Africa. Inefficiency is a silent killer within the African Healthcare system. In Africa, Over $178 million US is wasted annually in Southern Africa due to medical errors between healthcare practitioners and patients. According to the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over 100,000 deaths were caused by misdiagnosis and wrong medical administration due to a lack of or misinterpretation of medical records.   The main problems include misdiagnosis of patient conditions, miscommunication between Healthcare providers, patients and pharmacies as well as lack of crucial information when making medical decisions. 

Across Southern Africa,  18% of the population has been harmed when receiving in-care treatment in hospitals mainly due to medical errors. This represents around 14 million people and the cost on the healthcare system has totaled over $178 million US Dollars in 2021 alone. This has also led to 100 000 unnecessary deaths. 

Our solution is a web and mobile application that lets Healthcare providers and patients securely build and manage their medical profile which can be consensually accessed by medical professionals to make better informed medical decisions or during emergencies. This is particularly useful in rural and peri-urban Southern African geographies whereoften, children and women don’t get quality care due to negligence and discrimination. Without access to an internet connection, patients can order low cost, PETG smart cards that they can present to access their electronic health records. 

Impeelo will serve rural and under-served Southern African communities, with a major focus on women and children as the are the most vulnerable in our researched Southern African communities medically. Our first geographic target will be the Mauritian rural and Per-urban market, comprising of about 200 000 inhabitants. 

The Impeelo team is composed of Southern African individuals, with first hand experience of the community need Impeelo is addressing. Amongst the founding team, we have over 4 years of volunteer experience in rural and peri-urban medical institutions and have been personally affected negatively by the lack of easily accessible electronic health records. Furthermore, We are in communication with health practitioners from four Southern African countries we will be expanding to.

Impeelo has collaborated with  16 professional medical practitioners as research partners to understand their day-to-day handling of physical medical data and the digital products to increase their practice's efficiency and ultimately serve more patients. The crux of Impeelo is to ensure that medical practitioners can have access to all relevant patient medical data as quickly as conveniently possible, so they can not only administer correct medical care, but also do so as fast as they can whilst reducing the margin of error. This is especially significant in emergency situations.

Impeelo is a unique e - health record that stores a patient’s medical history and information. It is essential in emergency situations where  health care professionals need quick access to information to make informed diagnosis, especially in cases where a patient is unconscious, out of sound mind or is unaccompanied. These include past test results, allergies, blood type, as well as recording and observing of administration of drugs and therapies. 

With that in mind, Impeelo is an innovative solution that provides a significantly improved approach to the problem of healthcare delivery in the region. Our solution is designed to provide a comprehensive, integrated, and secure platform for healthcare providers to store, manage, and share patient data. In emergency situations, first responders can access a patient's easily access data through a low-cost, renewable NFC Card linked to a patient's records allowing them to make more informed decisions and provide better care.

Within our initial Mauritian market, we're currently collaborating with 14 self employed medical practioners, 2 institutions and our potential users  to monitor and analyse the current process of how medical records are kept and used and how to improve the process. 

Impeelo expects a relatively  steady adoption from patients through collaboration with medical institutions i.e government, doctoral practices and small to medium insurance firms. Over the next year, we will officially partner with 10 medical insurance companies 12 hospitals, with 7 being government institutions. This will be in line with the Mauritian government's goal of digitizing healthcare and going paperless by 2028 and we are currently a first mover within the Mauritian Market. We expect around 12000 people to use our platform with 400 being medical practitioners and 11600 being patients. Impeelo seeks to create a collaborative healthcare ecosystem by bringing both health care practitioners and patients in  creating efficient health records and saving unnecessary deaths.  

Impeelo provides two similar interfaces with minor differences on both the medical practitioner and patient sides. 

Patient’s interface will be a secure web and/or mobile app, allowing patients to create a profile, upload, view and manage medical data. Patients will also be able to share and/or allow access to their private(According to HIPAA regulations) medical data on a request basis. Patient platform will have a QR code generation option, which will give medical practitioners access to patient data, which can be very useful in emergency situations where the patient may be incapacitated.

Medical practitioners will also have access to a secure web and/or mobile app, however, profile creation will be medical institution approved/based. They can also, upon granted access, view patient data and can make prescriptions on platform. For time saving and convenience purposes, which are critical in the medical sector, there will be a text-to-speech option for easier recording for practitioners, backed by machine learning resources to cater for differences in accents, dialects, medical jargon, and to lower ambient noise interference.

As a cloud intermediary, Impeelo will be using a HIPAA compliant cloud server  to store patient data securely, and will have big data analysis (for improved medical care administration) handled by artificial intelligence to ensure patient data remains confidential and secure. Patients can also access low-cost RFID/NFC cards that medical practitioners can scan and immediately access patient medical data in cases of emergencies.  

During our initial research phase, we communicated with 57 potential users.  Impeelo will directly and meaningfully affect 12 000 people through preventive medical intervention. This will reduce medical errors and positively impact our users. 

Potential financial barriers to be incurred by Impeelo include subscription fees for cloud storage, with a specific focus on smart and focused machine learning, together with speech-to-text features. Cloud computing/hosting is on a pay-per-use basis, and impeelo will need to utilise multiple of these powerful computing features, we will also need to fund the RFID/NFC patient cards. Additionally, We also foresee an area of growth in mobile app building technical skills.

We have worked with SSRN hospital to better understand the issues associated with the current paper based storage systems and what the practitioners think of it, and with Anna Medical College, we tried to understand what change the next generation of medical practitioners may wish to see in their line of work’s data systems to make saving lives easier for them. 

Our product is an electronic health records platform in the form of a user-end and practioner-end app that uses Machine Learning to provide high-level and low-data cost usage to African Patients and doctors. Currently, over US$ 100 million is wasted by Southern African's various healthcare systems on medical errors leading to over 100,000 unnecessary deaths. Our solution seeks to be preventive, increasing the delivery of in and out-patient care within hospitals attributed less medical errors. This can be more important in rural errors where access to personal medical records is virtually impossible and isn't standardized for when a patient gets treated at another hospital. This complicates treatment and by providing electronic health records, we limit the error to misdiagnose. 

Impeelo’s financial stability will be dependent on grants, the sale of RFID cards to patients and an affordable family subscription fee. In the long term, Impeelo aims to create and manage a medical data storage ecosystem for doctors and medical facilities with yearly subscriptions. Subscriptions will be tailored to institutional needs and capabilities to meet their patient needs.