Meet the Africa-based digital health entrepreneurs building tools to support community health workers

Through the Bayer Foundation-funded Digital Health Ecosystem (DHE) project, PATH in partnership with Medic, recently awarded four Africa-based organizations with funding to expand their digital health tools for community health and explore sustainable business models.

This funding aims to support African digital health entrepreneurs to collectively build solutions using a common, open-source platform—the Community Health Toolkit, stewarded by Medic. The CHT is a human-centered, cost-effective, scalable digital solution that is designed specifically for use by community health workers.

With this funding, the award winners can leverage a proven, economically viable digital foundation for their digital tools while also receiving concerted organizational strengthening and business planning support.

More importantly, the four award-winning entrepreneurs are creating tools that will enable health care workers to improve the quality, speed, and access for equitable care to their communities.

Posh IT provides cutting edge technology that supports health sector workflow with a focus on community health. They likewise provide support to the Kenyan government and other Kenyan health institutions by increasing human resource capacity to better deploy and use digital health technologies. In partnership with Medic, Posh IT will fully onboard to the CHT to serve as a technical partner to help others build, integrate, and maintain apps on the CHT. This includes capacity building in app design, development, and site reliability engineering.

In partnership with PATH, Posh IT will develop a business plan for providing deployment partners with ongoing technical support, hardware, and maintenance services.

Guild Digital has built and supported the use of a Community Health Management Information System designed specifically to address strategic and operational gaps in refugee communities and for humanitarian health emergencies in Uganda.

With DHE funding, Guild Digital will build an application specifically for use by humanitarian response supervisors so that they can support village health teams in settlements. Through an existing relationship with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Uganda, Guild Digital will be able to field test and rollout the new application. Coupling that with sharing the settlement workflows with the CHT community, the supervisor tool will be well-poised to scale throughout Uganda and to other countries. Guild Digital with work with PATH on ways to explore financial and organizational sustainability by leveraging this possible expansion of their business.

Brink Innovation is a digital design and consulting firm based in Nairobi, Kenya. They design products and services to optimize performance, manage change, innovate, and achieve impact across multiple sectors, including health. In partnership with Medic, Brink Innovation will onboard onto the CHT to support additional counties in the roll out of the Kenyan Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS). This will allow Brink Innovation to become a fully-fledged CHT technical partner. Brink Innovation and PATH will also facilitate business-to-government and business-to-business engagements to strengthen Brink Innovation’s financial sustainability.

IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited is a Kenyan company that focuses on designing, developing, implementing, supporting, and maintaining health-enabled digital technology solutions, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. IntelliSOFT developed Mama’s Hub, a Maternal Health Information System with the digital/electronic Mother and Child Booklet to support collection, analysis, and dissemination of maternal health data at the facility level. Through the DHE project, IntelliSOFT will further develop the Mama’s Hub materials and documentation to guide integration into eCHIS. IntelliSOFT will also develop a pharmacovigilance module for CHT and prepare a scaling and sustainability plan for IntelliSOFT as a whole.

Over the next year, we will highlight the important work carried out by each of these grantees at different stages of their solution implementation. Stay tuned for more updates. Feel free to reach out with any questions around future opportunities through the DHE project at code@path.org.