IMPALA

GOAL 3

IMPALA

IMPALA facilitates a sustainable transition from reactive to proactive care that unburdens health workers and enables them to save lives and costs

's-Hertogenbosch, Nederland

NLD

Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit

The global shortage of healthcare workers is one of the most urgent challenges facing health systems today, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Understaffed and often undertrained health workers operate in high-pressure environments with limited tools and unreliable infrastructure. This leads to a vicious cycle of reactive care—treating patients only once conditions worsen—resulting in avoidable complications, higher mortality, and burned-out staff. Existing health technologies are not designed for these environments and often fail due to power outages, poor connectivity, and lack of local maintenance. Furthermore, current business models rely heavily on short-term donor funding, making long-term sustainability nearly impossible. At the same time, essential services like patient monitoring—which can significantly improve early detection and outcomes—remain largely unavailable. The result is a systemic failure to provide quality care at scale, particularly in neonatal and pediatric wards where the burden of disease is highest. To break this cycle, we must reimagine how care is delivered: empowering health workers with better tools, automating routine tasks, and ensuring sustainability from the outset. Sustainable and cost-effective data-driven technologies that are scalable and help to improve time and resource allocation at the clinical level as well as managerial levels.

GOAL 3’s solution is IMPALA—a data-driven, context-appropriate digital health platform designed to empower health workers and improve care delivery in resource-constrained hospitals. IMPALA combines an elegant and intuitive, but durable bedside monitoring device, a local server with battery backup, and an intuitive clinical application to streamline workflows, automate routine tasks, and enhance decision-making. It provides real-time, visual patient overviews using avatars and a traffic-light system, enabling early detection and prioritization of care. IMPALA is resilient to power-fluctuations and power-outages up to 10hrs, and uses reusable sensors to ensure high uptime and low operating costs. The platform was co-designed with frontline workers in Malawi and Rwanda, ensuring a seamless fit within local clinical workflows. IMPALA is delivered as part of a human-centric service model that includes tailored training, continuous learning through digital tools, and hospital-based champions who drive adoption and quality improvement. To ensure long-term sustainability, GOAL 3 uses an innovative hybrid financing model, with capital costs funded by third parties and service fees covered locally. We are now building a tech-enabled support layer to facilitate local service teams —enabling faster response times, better knowledge transfer, and more resilient, locally rooted systems of care.

Our solution directly serves frontline health workers and their most vulnerable patients—particularly newborns and children—in low-resource hospitals. These patients are currently underserved due to the lack of real-time monitoring, data-informed care, and skilled clinical support. With IMPALA, we’ve seen a transformation in both outcomes and experience: in St. Luke’s Hospital (Malawi), pediatric mortality dropped by 50%, critical illness events fell by 24%, and DALYs were reduced by 65%. In Zomba Central Hospital in Malawi, we saw a 26% mortality reduction, along with significant declines in workload and length of stay. For health workers, 92% reported reduced stress and improved efficiency. IMPALA improves decision-making, enables early interventions, and allows them to focus limited time on patients in need. At a system level, our economic evaluation shows that IMPALA reduces total societal costs by 17.9% and healthcare costs by 16.2% at Zomba, translating into $94 saved per patient, with over 70% of that savings benefiting patients and families. The societal impact is profound: fewer deaths, reduced financial burden on families, and stronger, more confident health systems. By turning hospitals from reactive to proactive environments, IMPALA contributes not just to better care—but to healthier, more resilient communities.