Creating an Empire of ‘Health Innovators’

 

It’s an exciting time in global health care industry as innovation and technology trends continue to impact the goal of reducing costs and increasing quality of patient-care. The health care industry is changing, but what is different about the industry in Nigeria is that the pace of change is miles away and has to speed up. However, keeping up with those changes is almost impossible.

Health care is at a major turning point as clinicians and hospitals look for ways to improve health outcomes while meeting cost limitations.  Technology has revolutionized many aspects of our lives as there seems to be an application (App) for almost everything these days. However, global health care system has remained largely on the sidelines of this transformation.

Three technology trends- Electronic Health Records, Big Data Analytics and Patient Access as well as Patient-Centric Devices-underlies much of the change happening in global health care right now.

Why Nigeria’s health care cannot afford to trail behind in the use of innovation and technology to advance health care, the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN) created the Nigerian Health Innovation Marketplace (NHIM) in 2014 to identify, spur and scale-up promising health innovations.

Among other things, NHIM is a veritable platform to build capabilities and bring promising health innovations to market readiness as well as connect health innovators and entrepreneurs with thought leaders, investors and key players in business, government and philanthropy to enhance broad-scale innovations and social impact.

 

To better position Nigeria’s health care for the future in the innovation space, the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology, Saving One Million Lives Initiative (SOMLI), NPHCDA, World Bank, Code for Africa, Co-creation Hub, Idea Hub and Cousant Technologies partnered to host the first-ever Health Hackathon in Nigeria in February 2014.

The landmark event witnessed teams of tech entrepreneurs participate in the day- long hackathon where the Alliance provided representative health care datasets that included facility level, household and programmatic data points for the leading causes of mortality, including malnutrition and malaria.

Locations of primary health care centers and referral hospitals in all 36+1 states in the country were unveiled with state level human resource for health data and other socio-economic indicators.

Winners emerging from the inaugural Health Hackathon- iQube Labs, Health Central and Health IT-developed innovative health solutions that addresses supply chain challenges of delivery of essential health commodities, data management tools for forecasting, etc.

iQube Labs used the Private Sector Health Alliance health care datasets to develop an innovative mobile health solution to address supply chain challenges for essential health commodities and incorporated GIS/crowd sourcing layers to potentially estimate alternative routes to support the distribution and management of drugs in crises prone states.

Health Central showcased an integrated predictive service delivery tool while Health IT provided access and info about health infrastructure and human resources for health mapping to empower patients.

 

Mr. Jim Ovia, co-chair, Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, stated that the NHIM comprises 3 core elements: Virtual Health Innovation Portal, Health Innovation Hub/Incubator and Health Innovation Challenge/Hackathon.

Dr. Muntaqa Umar-sadiq, CEO, PHN said “it is humbling to see an army of computer programmers and tech entrepreneurs develop mobile and ICT solutions that will empower the true heroines of the SOML, thousands of midwives, female community and village health workers, working in many rural areas across the country to save the lives of women, newborns and children.”

Not resting on its ores, the Alliance launched a $1 million Health Innovation Challenge (HIC) in December 2014 with bespoke problem statements across multiple tracks including increasing access to health coverage, service delivery support, data management systems, public health issues developed and targeted at addressing the aforementioned priority problem areas.

Within a three-month period, over 1, 000 entries were received across the six geopolitical zones of the country.  A shortlist of 42 novel innovations that demonstrated a blend of social impact and commercial viability were drawn up and are to proceed to stage 2 of the HIC. .

71 % of the shortlisted innovations are currently at the pilot or scale-up phase of the implementation and the Alliance seeks to support innovations to enhance the coverage of key primary health services to save at least 100, 000 lives as part of the SOMLI.

The shortlisted innovations were diverse and cut across the health care value chain including local manufacture of Ready-to-use Therapeutic Food (RUTFs) for malnutrition treatment‎, emergency referral support solutions, management of childhood illnesses and maternity services, drug information and resource centre, etc.

 

The second phase of HIC will focus on an accelerator program for shortlisted innovators. A business development bootcamp is slated to hold in August 2015 for the shortlisted innovators with the aim of transforming from their current stages into full-blown sustainable and viable social enterprises.

Award disbursement for winners of the Health Innovation Challenge range from $50,000 to $100,000 for service delivery and process innovations while $15,000 to support technology-based enablers. The investments will be disbursed based on outcomes, with tranches of payments triggered by achievement of certain technical and operational performance measures.

No doubt, startups in the Nigeria health care innovation space are set to change the way healthcare is delivered and practiced. Indeed, the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria is on the verge of creating an Empire of Innovators that will transform the nation’s health care to the next level