RubilabsRx Platform

Making pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostics and disease outbreak tracking radically simple, accessible, affordable, and effective, helping providers, from the largest health systems to the smallest drug shops, ensure everyone can access the care and prompt interventions they need to flourish. 

Michael Iyanro, CEO

To achieve an effective healthcare delivery system and outbreak containment, we must move healthcare from a centralized delivery model to a decentralized one. And community pharmacies and local drugstores must be at the centre to drive this change.   

Community pharmacies and drugstores (CPD) play a critical role in the delivery of health services in Nigeria. 73% of Nigerians utilize the services of CPDs. Several studies have shown that CPDs are the first source of care for between 8% — 55% of illnesses occurring among children under the age of five. They can serve as an instrument to properly and effectively track and report outbreaks.  

However, despite the important role CPDs play in the delivery of health services for the vulnerable, they face significant challenges.

They do not have access to the technological tools needed to function effectively within their communities. They are the biggest source of fake and substandard drugs in Nigeria. They run out of stock for important drugs at times people need them the most. They operate in very poor and unhygienic physical conditions which make them less convenient as spaces for patient care. 
 

We launched RubilabsRX to fix this.  

RubilabsRX Platform is designed specifically for Pharmacies and community drug shops in emerging markets. They provide essential access to care yet often struggle as small businesses - with data management, quality assurance, working capital - threatening their businesses and reducing access for the patient. We want RubilabsRx CPDs to represent the best primary care channel in the neighbourhood. To do this, we are challenging what it means to be a pharmacy and drugstore by enabling RubilabsRx members to proactively provide basic healthcare services in their neighbourhoods.  Pharmacies that partner with Rubilabs gain access to our technology and software. Rubilabs supports our partners for free as long as they are registered with us. This aligns our revenue with their success, which is aligned with patient usage.

Rubilabs is a sustainable social business that has the goal of catalytically transforming rural & peri-urban healthcare in ways that support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by employing a service delivery model that uniquely leverages technology and data in Healthcare, thereby demonstrating a sustainable service model to both public health authorities and capital markets. 

Specifically, Rubilabs would:

1. Enhance Operational Efficiency of the community drugstores by better cost management, capacity building of a team, improved supply-chain & more use of IT

2. Expand the range of services in health & wellness,chronic disease care and management, expanded distribution of diagnostics tools at the community level

3.  Integrating new services & products meeting customer needs thereby providing value for money

4.Combining of new products/services revenue, communication campaign and cost management resulting in faster breakeven for our network of CPDs

5. Strengthen local partnerships & alliances for the rollout of RubilabsRX in 5 new countries outside Nigeria

1)Rubilabs plans to onboard more than 1000 community pharmacies and drugstores (CPDs) thereby expanding access to quality healthcare facilities to 5 Million people, which serving 100,000 patients per month and expanding access to diagnostics services to more than 10 million people.

 2)It is expected that the Rubilabs model would get mainstreamed into the Public sector healthcare delivery mechanism

 3)Significant reduction in the number of Quacks operating in areas where RubilabsRX facilities are present 

4)Significant data insight to track ongoing or possible disease outbreaks such as Covid and Ebola among communities

5) Significant financial savings for the communities - currently estimated in excess of $50 Million per annum by virtue of RubilabRX facilities being available locally.

6) Generating direct & downstream employment for 10,000 personnel locally

Rubilabs intends to reach 100 Million beneficiaries by the year 2030

The three most important actions to achieve scale with RubilabsRX 

1. Onboarding, training, and retaining community pharmacies and drugstore partners: community pharmacy is a service business and reputation is important. Ultimately our success in building a reputation and expanding will depend on the quality of our CPD partners. There is a good pool of CPDs in Nigeria, and we need to find the best ones as we scale, and also train them on a set of clinical protocols that are standardized from facility to facility (just like Starbucks). 

2. Funding. We have run the pilot clinic and currently have more than 200 registered CPDs with us. This has proven to us that our clinical and health systems innovations are successful and that our assumptions about volume and pricing hold true. Our next steps are to raise approximately $1.5M expansion funds to take RubilabsRX to 1000 facilities in the next 2-3 years.  

3. Outreach. Successful growth will depend on our ability to help our CPDs reach their target population -- who often lack information about medicines and diagnostics health options --and make a compelling case that our CPDs are a better alternative to a public facility.  

We measure Rubilabs's impact on three levels: increase in patients served, improvement in health outcomes, and influence on other public and private providers. 

1. Increase in patients served: At capacity, each RubilabsRX Shop will serve 5000 patients per year. When we scale to 1000 clinics in 4 years, RubilabsRx shops will be providing services to 5M-10M clients a year. At scale, we will be providing over 100M people with essential diagnostics, access to quality medicines, family planning, and PMTCT services through our mobile units and clinics. These services would give us access to a huge amount of data and insight in these settings. 

2. Health outcomes: We will compare treatment and response rate within our facilities to comparable baseline rates in the areas we operate. Rubilabs’s CPDs will be trained and equipped to address over 70% of the complications that currently result in mortality in Africa. Our referral partnerships with tertiary care facilities will enable our clients to get rapid care for any complications. 

3. Our long-term theory of change is to raise the standard of care in the region. Our ambition is that private providers will replicate our models because they improve the bottom line and boost customer satisfaction.  

The risks in our model are around pricing and the volume of patients that we are able to generate for each RubilabRX facility. To provide an appropriately high level of service, we have a certain amount of fixed costs and running costs, for which we already have a detailed understanding. To be fully sustainable we have to achieve a certain volume of sales at a certain price. We can make a very well-educated projection about the volumes of patients we see at the prices we charge, the percentage of patients who come for blood tests that convert to medicine purchase, etc, based on our survey of other facilities. 

The other challenge is ensuring that payments are made. If a patient comes to our facility for an urgent blood test, we cannot refuse treatment. So have to ensure that there is a way of recovering the cost of the blood test. We are working to mitigate those risks by (a) providing financial training during our mobile clinics, (b) options for advanced payment in instalments; (c) working with micro-insurance agencies and the National Health Insurance Fund to defray out of pocket costs for women. 

Alchemist Accelerator

Conscious Venture Lab Fund

Enterprise Singapore

we are applying to the Trinity Challenge in other for us to gain access to the community of solvers, investors, experts, and partners who can help us propel RubilabsRX to the next level. The Trinity Challenge stimulates creativity and innovation and taps into the inner child. There is no doubt that this is the type of platform we have been looking for, where technology marries innovation, a place where our background, experience and skills can be put to use and together with others, make real things happen.

We are open to partnerships with universities, funders, researchers and manufacturers.