MaiSoin

There are two primary problems that MaiSoin tries to address. 1. The overall access to quality healthcare in Cote d’Ivoire and 2. The poor understanding of community level disease epidemiology. 

We are restructuring healthcare systems to bring medical care to the patient rather than the patient having to go to health center. Our use of technology facilitates the collection of data during the consultation and provide them with relevant health history to make better decisions. Increasing the number of people receiving care at their home will allow for more effective preventive care and better health outcomes.

At scale, we will be able to develop a granular understanding of disease epidemiology allowing us to provide guidance to public health institutions. Public health decision makers will be able to target more appropriately their interventions. Moreover, our platform will act as a monitoring system that would rapidly identify disease outbreaks.

African urban health systems are unadapted for their population's health needs. As urban centers grow, health structures are overburdened by non-urgent patient visits and pandemics, such as Covid-19.

Over the next 25 years, the African urban population is expected to double from 472 million in 2017 to over 900 million. In Côte d’Ivoire, where MaiSoin is headquartered, the government currently allocates ~5% of its budget to healthcare instead of the 15% committed in the 2001 Abuja Declaration. The population that is most impacted by a lack of resources in the public health system is the informal sector because they rely on daily wages and typically don’t have access to health insurance. In Côte d’Ivoire, the informal sector accounts for up to 77% employment. When the public health system has significant barriers to care, individuals tend to opt for riskier alternatives such as informal clinics and fake medication purchased in the market. 

Within a pandemic setting, health “nodes” become overcrowded, increasing transmission.

In addition, as a result of fragmented, and non-standardized approaches to data collection, public health policy makers do not have the relevant data to efficiently implement their interventions.

Our solution is to create a mobile application that allows health providers to connect with patients and provide household level care when appropriate. 

Patients will be able to request medical visits at their home, even without the internet, for themselves or their family members and can also use the application to track and monitor their health history, post reminders for themselves, and request consultations. Using the application, health centers can publish tasks, decentralizing their operations, based on their patients’ needs and are able to be completed at the household level such as replacement of post-surgical bandages, follow-up for chronic diseases, maternal health consultations, or even ensuring that patients have taken their tuberculosis medication. By using a gig economy-style network of health professionals, we ensure that there is always a qualified individual nearby to initiate the care. This also allows us to reduce transport costs and heavy administrative expenses. 

We use a cloud-based platform that ensures that only the user or their primary provider can view their health history to ensure patient confidentiality and security. By having a platform used by multiple health partners we are more effectively able to establish uniformity in data collection and improve comprehensive data analysis.

The population that we are targeting are individuals and families that work in the urban informal sector. Among many others, they are store owners, market vendors, construction workers, taxi drivers and the families they support. Before starting MaiSoin, we conducted customer discovery surveys and interviews in our target communities to understand the challenges they faced when seeking medical care and determine our proposed solution appealed to them. As we begin our activities and test our product, we plan to continue doing face to face customer interviews and engagement, as well as USSD code based surveys to review the quality of the care being provided and how we can continue to improve upon their needs. 

Our solution addresses their needs by:

1. Providing at home care at affordable prices

2. Limiting the time they spend at the health center or hospital to avoid taking them away from their revenue generating activities

3. Tailoring the care provided to the individual patient

4. Using data to more appropriately guide interventions that are designed based upon their needs and their realities

We address the Health Security & Pandemics challenge.Our solution is appropriate for this challenge because of the depth in which we seek to strengthen the health system. 

By providing household level care, we are able to reduce barriers to entry for individuals, increasing trust in health professionals and limiting exposure to unregulated healthcare. This also reduces the overcrowding of health infrastructure. An additional factor to providing care at patients’ homes is that we are able to collect more precise, accurate data on the patient. When properly analyzed, this data can significantly improve our understanding of disease within a given population.

Currently we have a web application MVP that offers the majority of the functionality we desire to connect health professionals and patients. Over 200 health professionals are part of our network and we have completed over 150 visits using the application throughout Abidjan.

The requests for visits has grown by over 100% each month since March 2020.

What we do on a daily basis is not new and this is precisely what makes it innovative. Patients who come out of surgery already seek out nurses to come to their homes to change their bandages. Individuals who are sick already call their relatives who are doctors to get advice on treatment.

What we are doing is creating a system that formalized and streamlines these existing behaviors so that they are more accessible to more individuals and that there is a higher level of supervision to ensure quality. 

It is specifically the leveraging of our understanding of the local context and shifting it to become more efficient and accessible is what makes us innovative. The technology simply improves our own efficiency.

However this "simple" shift in access opens up a radically different understanding of healthcare because now the health systems are going towards the patients rather than the other way around. 

Once we begin to scale and increase our data, we will be able to innovate through the use of our technology. Specifically with artificial intelligence and the understanding of diseases. 

Currently, people may go to the other side of the city to get healthcare. These diseases and their geographical providence are now entirely lost to epidemiologists. Through the use of integrated health records, home visits, and relationship management, we will be able to reconnect factors that could lead to disease spread and therefore advise how to best implement public health interventions.

Currently our solution has served 150 individuals.

In 1 year we hope to serve over 10,000 and in 5 we hope to reach over 1,000,000 individuals served.

1. Revenue per health professional

2. Repeat customers and the average costs they would have incurred by going to the clinic

Vanessa Azoubie - medical secretary

Dede Tounkara - COO

Mario Romero - CEO

Our team is uniquely positioned to solve this problem because of deep experience developing and implementing large scale community health based programs focused on active surveillance. We believe that without the active searching of cases and removing barriers to healthcare access, we cannot control disease outbreaks. Two of our team members have been part of the largest active surveillance in the world and worked to design the rollout of a mobile collection program, greatly increasing efficiency in data reporting and analysis. 

We also have compiled a board of advisors that have extensive experience in startups, investor relations, and telemedicine.

Furthermore, we have studied social entrepreneurship and worked within entrepreneurial ecosystems and have supported companies from the idea stage to financing.

Currently our leadership team is composed of an African woman and an American, caucasian, man. Combined, they have family on 5 different continents across dozens of countries. While diverse family backgrounds are not the definition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, our experience both personally and professionally have deepened our understanding of realities that might not be our own. This diversity of empathy as well as our networks have led us to be committed to empowering and recruiting individuals that not only have different backgrounds to us but are complimentary and allow us to continue broadening our understanding and representation, particularly for those that we seek to serve. 

From a tangible perspective, we are highly committed to prioritizing women doctors with opportunities to our platform to increase their visibility and the revenue that they're able to generate. 

As a nascent startup working in a country and a region with little access to a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem, we are excited to have the opportunity to tap into a community such as Solve and MIT. While we have access to many of the basic talent and organizational needs, we don’t want to be a normal company. We want to revolutionize the way that healthcare is provided and thought about within West Africa and eventually throughout the world. To do this, we need to talk to leaders in the field, be guided by experts who have already scaled companies, and look to create a technological advantage that not only makes us a dominant player but allows us to protect our customers' data privacy while receiving the best care possible. 

We believe that the Solve community is uniquely placed to provide us with these needs and we are excited to have the opportunity to apply. 

We know that coming up with a solution and creating a product that revolutionizes our approach and the community’s relationship with healthcare is not easy. To do this, we need to have experts that are ready to creatively build new concepts in ways that go beyond our founders’ expertises and experience. Considering the relationship with MIT and the depth of experience that Solve has with utilizing technology for the worlds’ most challenging problems, we hope that we can identify individuals and organizations that have a similar vision and are open to helping us achieve these goals together.

In order to get to the next level and beyond our current MVP, we are stuck in a vicious cycle that we believe Solve can help us get out of. To provide the innovation we need to improve our technology, however, we can only reach the level of innovation through scale and big data, and in order to scale we need financial support which unfortunately we have run into barriers receiving because of the lack of proprietary technology. 

We believe we are in a very positive position right now and will continue to grow but to truly achieve our goals we believe Solve is the place to come to get the resources and support we need.

In general we are actively seeking partnerships with local and regional health organizations that have similar missions and objectives. Particularly, we would be very interested in partnering with the Ivorian Ministry of Health and their Institute of Public Hygiene which is responsible for the COVID-19 response in the country. We believe that a strong partnership would allow us to properly align our data, permitting them to have a better understanding of community diseases and better identify cases of transmissible diseases that are going underreported. 

With regards to the Solve community, we are very interested in faculty and students that are interested in predictive epidemiological technology and how to use AI and/or machine learning to create tools for health professionals.

Specifically, we are very interested in partnering with:

• Ada Health to understand their technology and how it could help our network improve health indicators 

• CareMother in order to use Fetosense during our prenatal monitoring visits and create a focus specifically around maternal care

• MedicMobile or ClickMedix for technological support in developing our mobile technology and workflow

• SimPrints to utilize their biometric patient identification to ensure patient confidentiality and follow-up