• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Start-ups prove Nigeria’s health issues have digital solutions

Digital medical Health Solutions

James Alban (not real name), a Lagos-based civil servant, needed a doctor to attend to his hepatitis case. He signed up to Mobidoc, also known as mobile doctor, which has hundreds of volunteer doctors on its platform. A specialist on the platform got Alban’s medical case as a text message on her phone and commenced a chat with him. A meeting was subsequently held between the patient and the doctor. Alban’s case was treated and he was charged 25 percent lower than he would have paid had he gone directly to a hospital.

Mobidoc verifies the authenticity of every doctor that signs up manually from the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) and other professional bodies. So, most of the doctors on its platform are known in their professions.

“We are determined to solve the problems of patients having to queue for a long time before having an access to a doctor,” Abiodun Okunola, Mobidoc’s business development executive, told BusinessDay.

Start-ups like Mobidoc are proving that Nigeria’s health challenges can be overcome with simple digital solutions. Today, one does not necessarily need to go to the hospital to get a doctor.
Like Alban, 41-year-old Joshua Okonua was a tuberculosis patient at a general hospital in Onitsha, south-eastern Nigeria. A drug was prescribed for him but he could not find it in pharmacies and open markets. Two weeks ago, he found it on DrugStoc’s multi-channel, cloud-based platform, which has over quality 7,000 drugs. He noticed that DrugStoc traces all the drugs on its platform to their manufacturers, which is an easier way of identifying which is which.

“What we saw were counterfeiting, fragmented market, poor access to credit and all the issues that patients would encounter when they go to the hospitals. They go there, there are no drugs and the drugs they will even find are fake. So, we are eliminating such,” Chibuzo Opara, co-founder of DrugStoc, told BusinessDay at The Hague, Netherlands, during the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) held between June 3 and 5.

Opara explained that DrugStoc works with over 800 pharmacies and hundreds of hospitals which buy drugs directly from the platform.

If you are a pregnant woman and need a doctor, then visit Ask The Gynaecologist (ATG), which has helped over 500,000 women have their children without complications. The platform assigns a doctor to a patient and offers free follow-ups in private conversations. Treatments and consultations are in the upwards of $21.

Nigeria has grim health statistics. Ten percent of all the children born die, according to the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), just as 80,000 Nigerians die of cancer every year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Fifteen thousand are killed by heart-related diseases.

About 2,000 doctors leave for the United Kingdom, the United States or Asia to make more money, said the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA).

According to data from World Bank, Nigeria had 814 per 100,000 maternal mortality rates in 2015, caused by the loss of too much blood within 24 hours after a woman has given birth.
These grim statistics and harsh realities characterise Nigeria’s healthcare system, which ranks 197 out of 200 countries in the WHO ladder or 171 out of 195 (in terms of investment) on the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

But the likes of Mothers Delivery Kit are trying to plug such health gaps. It uses a data-driven platform to save the lives of women at childbirth, supplying them with all they need at just $5.
“We have sold over 500,000 kits since we started in 2014,” Adepeju Jaiyeola, chief executive of Mothers Delivery Kit, told BusinessDay at The Hague.

“The location of a woman and her economic life should not determine whether she lives or dies at childbirth,” she added.

Flying Doctors of Nigeria (FDN) was founded by Ola Orekunrin, a British-born Nigerian and a medical doctor, to provide air ambulance services, moving injured patients as well as patients with health challenges to hospitals for adequate attention. It leverages technology in doing so.
Victoria Duru, company’s administrator, in a mail sent to BusinessDay, said FDN’s focus is on transferring critically unwell persons from areas of limited access to medical care and specialist centres using available technology to save as many Nigerian lives as possible.

According to the Federal Ministry of Health, 1.7 million units of blood are needed every year to save human lives in Nigeria.

To find the blood and deliver it to the person that needs it to survive is a challenge, but Giwa-Tubosun is dedicated to solve this challenge through her application, LifeBank.

To do this, LifeBank mounts campaigns for blood donations, connects blood donors to the nearest blood banks and links them to the hospital that needs the blood to save lives.

One of its two platforms allows hospitals to request for blood while the other allows voluntary donors to indicate their willingness to donate blood. LifeBank directs donors to the nearest blood bank in one of over 25 blood banks in Lagos where blood is collected and stored.
When requests for blood are made through LifeBank app, Giwa-Tubosun collects the blood and delivers it to the hospital that needs it using her logistics team, she said.

To solve the challenge posed by Lagos traffic in delivering blood to the needed patient on time, Giwa-Tubosun uses dispatch motorbike to deliver blood, keeping it at 10 degrees Celsius and in Bluetooth-padlocked boxes that can only be opened by the intended recipient.

“We give a service that means the difference between life and death to so many people,” said Giwa-Tubosun.

InStrat Global Health Solutions collects health-related data about diseases and shares such data with governments, health ministries, agencies, international organisations and hospitals in order to avert possible occurrence of epidemics.

Using an application known as Early Warning Outbreak Recognition system (EWORs), Okey Okuzu, founder/CEO, told BusinessDay that the process is simple.

It requires that health-related data of places are regularly sent out to the relevant authorities in order to keep track of behaviours of diseases. In such a way, authorities will be able to easily track changes in behavioural patterns of a particular disease.

Okuzu explained that if over a period of time the data remain constant, it means the issue is still within the scope. However, if it is observed that the number of people being treated for, say, diarrhoea, has increased, it is an indication that something is not adding up somewhere. It is then clear to every stakeholder that epidemic is looming.

“So when you have a situation where there is an elevation in reported diseases that are beyond the historical level, then we need to alert the authorities that there is something going on,” Okuzu explained.

 

ODINAKA ANUDU, JOSEPH MAURICE OGU & GBEMI FAMINU