MDaaS Global

At MDaaS Global we build and operate tech-enabled diagnostic centers in clinically-underserved communities across Africa. We connect low-income and middle-income patients with modern, convenient, and affordable diagnostic services, helping our patients to identify health issues earlier, gain access to medical specialists and treatment options, and, ultimately, live healthier, happier lives. We offer a wide range of services including imaging (digital x-ray, ultrasound, & mammography), cardiac (ECG, echo), and lab (chemistry analysis, immunoassay, and hematology) services. We serve as the centralized diagnostic department for all surrounding hospitals and clinics in the community, currently partnering with over 60 referring health facilities at our flagship center in Ibadan, Nigeria. Our big vision at MDaaS Global is to provide modern, connected healthcare for Africa’s next billion. 

By 2030 in Africa, deaths due to lifestyle diseases (e.g. cancer, heart disease, diabetes) will outnumber deaths from communicable, maternal, perinatal and nutritional diseases combined (WHO). At the same time, the population of the continent is exploding, reaching 2.5B by 2050. Unfortunately, existing hospitals and clinics aren’t equipped to meet the growing and changing needs of patients. Public healthcare has been chronically underfunded across the continent, receiving less than 5% of GDP. Private health facilities are, on average, small (less than 30 beds) and fragmented (not part of a healthcare network) and cannot achieve the economies of scale needed to invest in and maintain capital equipment. An estimated 40% of all medical equipment is currently out of service, while the majority of functioning equipment is concentrated in affluent city centers. These trends represent a market failure: low- and middle-income patients living in peri-urban areas cannot access or afford diagnostic services, resulting in late (or no) detection and premature death.

Our target market is low- and middle-income Africans living in urban and peri-urban areas. Today, in Nigeria alone, there are over 300 cities and over 130 million patients who fall into our target market, representing both a huge clinical need and a $1.3 billion opportunity. Given the looming epidemic of non-communicable diseases described above, we focus on high-impact and preventative diagnostic procedures, such as digital x-ray, mammography, echocardiography, and pap smears.

Running our flagship diagnostic center in Nigeria for almost 2 years now has allowed us to gain deep insights into the challenges our patients face. Affordability of services and ease of access (how difficult is it for patients to physically get to a healthcare facility) are the two biggest challenges we hear from patients. Twice a year, we run an in-depth survey to understand, in detail, the barriers our patients face in accessing care and ask for their thoughts on how we at MDaaS can better serve them. For example, in response to feedback we received from our first survey, we added a children's play area to our clinic (over 60% of our patients are women, many of whom bring their children to the center).

At MDaaS Global we build and operate tech-enabled diagnostic centers in clinically-underserved communities starting in Nigeria. As of June 2019 we serve an average of 28 patients per day in Ibadan, Nigeria with radiology, ultrasound, and laboratory diagnostic procedures starting at just US$ 4, with an average patient visit costing US $20. These patients are referred by their primary care providers from local public and private hospitals, as well as local businesses who provide health check-up benefits for their employees. All of these institutions and their patients are attracted by our unique offering: high quality diagnostics at a drastically reduced price compared to the existing offerings. Our low-cost services expand accessibility for evidence-based care, getting more patients healthy, faster. 

We launched our first center in November 2017 in a low-income community in Ibadan, Nigeria. We currently partner with over 60 hospitals and clinics who refer patients to us for diagnosis, amplifying their impact and strengthening the local healthcare ecosystem. We have generated over $150K in revenue and are profitable at the center level. 95% of our patients would recommend us to a family member or friend. Since launching, we have served over 10,000 patients.

Our approach generates success and expands access in the market for healthcare diagnostics through three primary competitive advantages:

1. A vertically-integrated supply chain: We source, refurbish, ship, install, and maintain all of our own medical equipment in house. By focusing on refurbished equipment and bypassing non-value-adding importers, we are able to reduce our set up costs by 60% and maintain 99% up times. We’re able to extend those savings to our patients and enter into markets where existing providers can’t go.
2. Partnership-driven customer acquisition: We build relationships with a wide range of partners (referring physicians, employers, insurance companies, etc.) in order to complement and strengthen the existing healthcare ecosystem. In addition, working with many diverse partner organizations helps us to achieve the high volumes we need at our centers in order to maximize equipment utilization and keep our prices low. 
3. Patient-centered, tech-enabled operations: We use an in-house tech platform, Olewerk, to streamline patient visits, reduce wait times, and easily connect with our offsite specialists and our referring clinicians. We combine this use of technology with a human-centered experience for patients to provide excellent care at affordable prices.

Technology is key to our ability to deliver on our value proposition and offer high-quality and affordable diagnostic services to low- and middle-income patients at scale. Olewerk enables us to maintain lean operations (and keep care affordable for patients), connect patients to the care they need more quickly, and make data-driven clinical and operational decisions:

1. Automated Clinical Workflow: reduced patient wait times, improved patient experience, reduced administrative work for providers.

2. Electronic Medical Records & Medical Image Archiving (PACS): Continuity between patient visits, fewer lost records, opportunities for analytics and artificial intelligence-enabled care.

3. Telemedicine: access to remote specialists for readings and second opinions.

4. Billing: reduced paperwork, transparent accounting, faster repayment to referring hospitals.

5. Patient Experience (patient surveys, appointment reminders): better, more personalized care.

From our experience in the market over the past 2 years, we have identified and addressed the biggest pain points experienced by patients, clinicians and employers with respect to accessing diagnostic care:

Patients: Affordable services, convenient locations (reduces travel time and costs), excellent patient experience including friendly staff, comfortable and clean facility, low wait times, digital reporting, access to medical specialists via telemedicine.

Referring Clinicians: Clinically-accurate and timely reporting, digital report options, free second opinion if they are unsatisfied with or have questions about a result, on-time payment of referral fees, excellent patient experience (doctor’s actually care about this!)

Organizations: All of the patients’ test can be done in one location, excellent patient experience, timely and quality reporting. In the future we will have many centers across the country so organizations with a national presence will only need to deal with one diagnostic company for patient testing across the country.

On the clinical side, prevention and early detection of both communicable and non-communicable disease is proven to reduce morbidity and mortality rates. We believe that by leveraging our vertically-integrated supply chain, technology platform, and patient-centered design, we will be able to offer high-quality and affordable diagnostic services to low- and middle-income patients. By placing these centers where our patients live their lives and building strong referral networks, patients will be more likely to seek care. We will be able to diagnose earlier and more frequently, resulting in increased life expectancy and higher quality of life. 

To date, we have provided diagnostic services to over 10,000 low- and middle-income patients at our flagship center in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Over the next 6 months, we will be launching 4 new diagnostic centers 4 cities in south west Nigeria. Across these 5 facilities we expect to serve over 20,000 patients within the next 12 months. When fully ramped up, we estimate that each center will serve over 10,000 patients per year.

Our goal is to open a total of 100 diagnostic centers over the next five years, directly serving over 1 million patients per year. 

Over the next 5 years, we aim to open over 100 facilities, serve over 1 million patients per year, generate over $22M in annual revenue, and expand into other African markets. As we look to new potential markets, we are excited to partner with local healthcare organizations and ministries of health, leveraging our low-cost diagnostics model to strengthen existing healthcare systems. Our goal is to get to a point where we have a "diagnostic center in a box": we can provide the medical equipment, clinical and administrative training materials, operating guides, and software to quickly set up a new center and start delivering care. 

As we grow, Olewerk will provide us with the tech infrastructure and data we need to share resources across centers and realize economies of scale; for example, we can have one remote radiologist reading images for multiple centers or a mobile mammography unit shared across centers. Currently Olewerk is an internal tool, but over the next year, we plan to build out clinician and patient-facing portals which will allow clinicians to access and analyze results faster and offer new features to patients, such as reviewing test results online, online booking, and on-demand doctor consultations. As we gather more patient data, we are also excited to leverage AI and machine learning to assist in diagnosis, improve patient outcomes, and further drive down cost of care.

The biggest challenge we will face over the next year is hiring and onboarding adminstrative and clinical staff for four new centers. Another challenge is building a large network of partner institutions in each new city we enter.

Over the next five years, our key challenges will be access to funding, further developing technology team and platform to manage dozens of diagnostic facilities rather than just a handful.

Over the next year, we will lean heavily on our network of local advisors and medical professionals here in Nigeria as we expand into new cities. We will continue to draw on our communities at Techstars, the MIT Legatum Center, and the Harvard Social Innovation and Change Initiative as we iterate on our hiring and training practices and work to build a company culture centered on patient experience and data.

Over the next five years, we will leverage our existing investor network to identify the best sourcing and types of funding for our business model, with a focus on identifying providers of debt and impact debt for healthcare companies. On the technology side, we can continue to use our connections with MIT as well as our network of fellow tech entrepreneurs here in Lagos and across Africa to source top tech talent as we grow.

MDaaS HQ: 5 full-time, 3 part-time, 1 contractor

Front-Line Administrative & Clinical Staff: 16 full-time

Each of my co-founders brings to the team both critical technical expertise and personal commitment to the problems we are working to solve. Soga Oni, our CEO, is an MIT-trained systems engineer and the son of a Nigerian primary care doctor. Opeyemi Ologun, our Country Manager, has extensive local sales and management expertise. Joe McCord, our Director of Supply Chain & Global Partnerships, has run supply chain operations in 11 African countries and has built his life and career around ensuring essential drugs and equipment get to the people who need them. And I (Genevieve Barnard Oni) have a background in public health and bring my MBA and MPA skill sets to the CFO role. We have been working together for over four years now, and I continue to be inspired by my co-founders’ ingenuity, passion, and resilience. I am also grateful for our diversity as a team representing different cultures, religions, nationalities, races, genders, educational backgrounds, and life experiences. We aren’t afraid to disagree with one another and voice our perspectives; as a result, we are able to see a much wider spectrum of options available to us at each decision point.

We currently partner with over 60 different hospitals, clinics, and labs in Ibadan who refer patients to us. We also work with several corporate partners and health insurance providers, who use MDaaS to provide quality diagnostics to their employees and beneficiaries. As we expand into new cities this year, our network of partners will continue to grow.

Our flagship diagnostic center broke even on its operations within 5 months of opening, and we expect the center will be able to pay back the upfront investment ($90,000) within the next year. We anticipate that we will be able to breakeven at a company level after launching 20 diagnostic centers.

My team and I are excited about the opportunity to become a member of SOLVE community and be able to contribute to and benefit from the network. Many of the challenges that we will face over the coming year related to people operations and building the best possible team to deliver our desired impact. I believe SOLVE, with its mentorship opportunities and global connections, is uniquely position to help us grow our team and connect with global healthcare leaders around the world.

We will use the prize to open an additional diagnostic center in a high-need community.