Emergency Response Africa

Emergency Response Africa is a healthcare technology company that is changing how medical emergencies are managed in Africa, beginning in Nigeria.

We are building the largest network of First Responders, emergency response vehicles, and verified Emergency-Ready hospitals across Nigeria who are connected to emergency victims using our technology application. This end-to-end subscription service ensures that in any medical emergency, we deliver the right level of care at the scene in as little as 10 minutes, and if needed, the patient is transferred to the most appropriate hospital for prompt treatment.

Users of our service include insurers, corporate and community organizations, individuals, and families. Our subscribers enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing emergency help is just around the corner.

Every year, more than 200,000 people in Nigeria die from road accidents, birth complications and cardiovascular diseases - just 3 of the top causes of emergencies. Across Africa, this number is in millions. Many of these deaths can be prevented with access to an effective emergency system. Unfortunately, just 9% of Africans are covered by any formal EMS system. Governments struggle to acquire, staff, and maintain ambulances at scale and lack the communications infrastructure to coordinate an effective system. In Nigeria, 1 ambulance serves nearly 191,000 people (compared to 1:11,000 in developed countries). Ambulances take 1 hour+ to arrive and a single ride costs 1.5x an average wage earner's monthly salary. Emergency victims are often left to get themselves to a hospital, yet have no guarantee of treatment because the hospital may not be suited to their emergency. These severe delays lead to unnecessary death and disability. The COVID-19 pandemic has further worsened the situation as people are less likely to seek proper attention due to fear of COVID, even in an emergency. We saw an opportunity to use technology to effectively coordinate a community-based emergency response and leverage data to predict and prevent future emergencies.

Our solution leverages the power of technology and the community to create a sustainable and scalable emergency medical services (EMS) system. We are building the largest network of trained and equipped First Responders, emergency vehicles, and verified emergency-ready hospitals, to give patients access to the right level of care at the scene of an incident, and if needed, transportation to the most appropriate hospital for their emergency. At the heart of this network is ResQ, our intelligent dispatch and communication technology platform. 

ResQ creates a line of communication between emergency victims, first responders, and hospitals. The ResQ platform consists of: 

• Mobile application for first responders 

• Web application for the command centre 

• Web application for hospitals 

• Mobile application for subscribers 

These four components work together to ensure a trained responder is on the scene in as little as 10 minutes and quality emergency care is delivered. When victims or bystanders request for help via phone call or mobile application, the system analyzes the case and dispatches the most appropriate responders based on their location, training, access to vehicle, and equipment. If advance care is needed, the patient is transported to a partner hospital for prompt treatment.

Although medical emergencies can affect anyone, we have identified the following as key audiences to serve:

• Middle-aged and older adults managing chronic conditions (high blood pressure, diabetes, respiratory illnesses, heart disease) totaling about 48 million people

• Pregnant and nursing mothers, families with young children, propelled by one of the highest fertility rates in the world at 5.4 children per woman

• Corporate organizations or associations engaged in high-risk industries e.g. logistics, construction, manufacturing. With its poor occupational health and safety record, Nigeria has very high rates of workplace accidents making fast, reliable emergency services a needed solution.

Since launching our pilot in March, we have responded to over 100 incidents and contributed to saving lives. Cases include:

• Cardiac arrest
• Loss of consciousness
• Injuries and severe bleeding
• Convulsions
• Suicide attempt
• Breathing difficulty/Asthma
• Pregnancy/labor challenges

These incidents have validated not only the need for our service but also the role of effective health management in preventing emergencies.

We have partnerships with healthcare organizations supporting individuals living with chronic conditions, enabling us to better understand their needs and risks of emergency incidents. Community screening initiatives for disease risk factors give us access to data that is to be used in building a predictive model for medical emergencies.

We currently support 55 pregnant/nursing mothers through our New Mom Community with a group of pregnant mothers across Nigeria, supporting them and their babies by answering pertinent health questions.

Through ambulance service coverage and first aid/CPR training, we also work with communities and corporate organizations in our target industries to understand their needs and help to prevent and effectively manage emergencies. We are currently building relationships with health insurance providers which will give us access to a higher volume of emergency incidents and comprehensive health data to enhance predictions and improve our response. In return, by providing care at the emergency scene, we also reduce emergency room visits and ultimately healthcare costs for corporate bodies.

Our solution best addresses the "Equip last-mile primary healthcare providers" challenge because of the central role that our network of First Responders and technology play.

Instead of more ambulances, we have focused on building a network of trained and equipped First Responders embedded in their community who respond within minutes in a hyperlocal way. In an emergency, Nigerians tend to call for help from close contacts who are medical professionals. Our technology platform helps to more efficiently deliver care.

Real-time transmission of patient data from incident scene to healthcare facility and AI, also aids disease surveillance and early warning predictions.

We selected the pilot stage because we have launched in Lagos, Nigeria, with plans in progress to expand into other states.

We currently have a team of 24 First Responders active, with another 50 ready to be activated in several states over the next 3 months. We have established partnerships with 10 private hospitals that successfully completed our emergency readiness verification program, and aim to onboard another 10 hospitals in the next 3 months. 

We launched this pilot project in March 2021 and have been able to respond to over 100 incidents that required phone-based first aid, onsite care, and/or transportation to hospital. The feedback received so far has been positive, with users of the service appreciating our speed of response and empathy.

Very early on, we realised that the solution to Africa's emergency medical services gap was not simply "more ambulances" - most African countries lacked the financial capacity to acquire and maintain them, trained paramedics to staff them, effective road and technology infrastructure to coordinate fast response. In addition, cultural aversions to using ambulances - often seen as transport for corpses - and a tendency of people to call relatives with medical training for help in emergencies made it clear that a community First Responder approach enabled by technology could be the path to creating a faster, more scalable and sustainable system.

This approach gives us a three-fold competitive advantage:

• Speed: We can consistently deliver faster response times driven by the use of data and mobile technology to connect our network of first responders and vehicles, and predict emergencies to optimize our response. 

• Scalability and reach: With our command centre and technology in place, we can rapidly scale our response to any geography where there are various cadres of medical workers and an internet connection. Our goal is to rapidly build the largest network of first responders in Africa, and by simultaneously aggregating emergency vehicles on our platform, create a system that reaches even the furthest parts of the continent effectively. 

• Affordability: By leveraging network effects to offer an affordable subscription and partnering with healthcare funders and government schemes, we eliminate the need for emergency victims to pay large sums out of pocket when an emergency occurs.

Today: We currently have served a total of 400 people since launching our pilot 3 months ago. This includes 135 direct responses to incidents, 30 First Responders trained, and more than 220 individuals that have participated in our first aid training and preventive public health education initiatives.

1 year from now: Through partnerships with public and private sector health insurance schemes, we expect to be positioned to serve at least 2,500 people with emergency incidents.

In 5 years: We expect to have coverage in at least 30 of Nigeria's 36 states and be active in Ghana. We anticipate responding to at least 250,000 emergency requests annually at this stage.

We have identified the following as our some of our most important KPIs:

• Emergency incidents addressed

• Lives saved
  

• Response time

• Active First Responders in network

• Emergency-ready hospitals/Vehicles in network

Because we exist to save lives, lives saved will always be our core measure of success and impact. We are glad to already be receiving testimonials from patients' families of the impact of our service on their love one's life.

In addition to this, we measure several metrics that enable the lifesaving work - response times and growth of our network. During our pilot, our team has consistently reached incident scenes in an average of 20 minutes, 66% faster than average response times, and we know that this response time will continue to improve to reach our target of 10 minutes as we grow our first responder and hospital network. Investing in growing our network will be a key focus for us to ensure that we have the best resources available to our beneficiaries with a single request.

We have a total of 16 team members, excluding part-time first responders.

10 full-time

• Management (3)
• Medical Operations (5)
• Software Development (2)

3 contractors

• Software Development (2)
• Marketing & Sales (1)

24 part-time first responders

In many ways, our team represents those our solution seeks to serve. I (Folake) founded ERA because of an experience calling 911 for my child while living in Canada. I was grateful to have such a fast, reliable response. I bring more than 10 years experience in public health, management consulting, and marketing communications to the leadership of ERA. Our CTO, Maame, brings years of software development experience in edutech and fintech to build our solution, and her personal experience losing a loved one to an emergency situation in Ghana.

Our technology team have built solutions for health tech and fintech and are experienced in creating user-centred applications. Supported by our data scientist, our solution is optimised from the start to generate insights that can help to better manage and predict future emergencies. 

Our operations team is made up of individuals with years of experience in emergency medicine and the development sector, ensuring we can deliver quality care through a well-structured and scalable program.

All of this is supported by a team of exceptional international advisors and mentors with expertise in healthcare, finance, software development and insurance.

ERA is a female-led organization that is intentional about ensuring representation of women at all levels and in all parts of the business, both operational and technical. 100% of our management team and 50% of our full-time software development team is female, and overall, our organization is 40% female. Our first responder network also achieves a similar gender balance, which is important for the Nigerian context where healthcare issues affecting women can be particularly sensitive. The organization also reflects both the cultural diversity of our base of operations, Lagos, Nigeria. We avoid harmful discriminatory practices by having a well structured recruitment process that is designed to identify both technical and cultural fit on the basis of our core values.

As we grow our organization, we will put structures in place to prevent a gender pay gap and ensure balance is maintained at both the leadership level and front line.

We are applying to Health Security and Pandemics Challenge because the focus on better preparing the world against health emergencies aligns closely with our solution's vision - an Africa where anyone can receive emergency medical care in 10 minutes or less. A funding and support relationship between MIT Solve and ERA can accelerate the achievement of both parties' visions. Specifically:

1. Access to funding will accelerate our timeline towards building Africa's largest network of emergency care. With this in place, coordinating a response to future public health emergencies is as simple as activating the network.

2. Access to the technical expertise of the Solve network will greatly enhance the capacity of our technology team, enabling us to solve problems quicker, better collect and analyze data, and create a suite of technology products that enable more effective response.

3. Access to the centuries of operational excellence demonstrated by the Solve network members across many emerging markets will enable our operations and growth team take a huge vision and distill it into actionable, achievable milestones.

Few competitions and funding/acceleration opportunities align as closely with ERA as this challenge and we would be honored to be selected as a finalist.

With an Africa wide vision to tackle one of the wickedest problems in healthcare, we recognize the need for a high level of support. There are many opportunities for impact in emergency response across Africa, even beyond medical emergencies. We would like to work with experts to identify and take advantage of these opportunities to serve more Africans. We require support in structuring and executing our next fundraising round and would like to set up a board of directors that reflects our Pan-African vision. Finally, expanding across the continent will require a strong understanding of distribution networks, regulatory issues, and public relations, supported by robust quality assurance or monitoring and evaluation. Although we are in the early stages of this journey, our eyes our firmly fixed on the vision and we wish to build with the end in mind.

We are very interested in building relationships with technology, data analytics, insurance, and healthcare organizations, as well as government. Specifically:

• Organizations like Google, in collaboration with government, will be critical for helping us solve the issue of automatically transmitting location data from callers' devices to our technology platform. This will significantly reduce our response times by at least 2 minutes.

• Insurance and financial services organizations like AXA will be valuable in expanding our network's reach to covered patients in new markets as the network grows. We will also contribute to their customer value proposition as a responsive provider.

• The data analytics capacity and health industry expertise in MIT and other organizations like Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and McKinsey & Company will enable ERA's solution to not only respond effectively to emergencies but leverage our growing dataset to better predict and prevent them.

• International development partners like Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation's has years of experience working on various health issues across Africa, reaching the furthest parts of the continent with care. Their expertise in delivering high-impact well structured programs will be invaluable as we build our network of care.

In addition to being a women founded and led organization, our solution holds promise for significantly improving the welfare of women, particularly pregnant women and mothers of young children. While emergency care is in itself not new, our new technology-driven and community based approach can lead to a significant reduction in maternal and child mortality by ensuring prompt response on the scene and fast transport to a healthcare facility when emergencies occur.

We intend to apply the AI for Humanity Prize to our machine learning project. We intend to apply time series regression techniques to estimate the demand for medical emergency responses to better allocate limited medical responders to areas where and when they are needed. With this product we can obtain strategic insights as to where to recruit and engage responders will allow us to operate cost-effectively. We will also be able to deliver on our promise of a 10 minute response time, which is essential for saving lives and a very attractive value proposition to health insurance providers and key driver of subscription revenues. We will also be able to provide data to governments and relevant bodies working on policies and programs to improve health outcomes.

This project also contributes significantly to our long-term goal of licensing our applications as a SaaS product to emergency organizations and governments with large fleets to coordinate, providing a home-grown command, control, communication and intelligence solution for Africa.