Shamseya for innovative Healthcare Solutions

Eye investigations require specialized equipment and are dependent on highly trained and experienced ophthalmologists specialized in investigations.

Such services are often expensive and centralized in big cities only where such specialized ophthalmologists reside. Patients often have to travel to find these services; which adds effort, cost, time, transportation and sometimes accommodation and even then, these services are often not found at all. This is specially true in a country like Egypt and in most African nations and particularly relevant with the safety risks on patients and doctors during COVID-19 and beyond.

This is why we have developed iCheck. A solution that enables highly specialized investigative ophthalmologists to visualize and operate remote equipment, live! 

This means accurate diagnosis provided to patients affordably, efficiently and safely, anywhere. This means access to services that were never accessible beyond central cities and high income countries. This means affordable services, safer settings, reduced waiting times and waiting lists and a more equitable healthcare.

We are already providing these services in 3 facilities in Egypt. This prize would support our plans to mainstream this solution to cover 3 underserved regions in Egypt and equip 2 facilities to offer iCheck services in 2 African countries.

My mother is an ophthalmologist. My father, was a surgeon. Throughout my years at Cairo medical school, I began to realize the impending defects and chaos in the Egyptian healthcare delivery machine. My focus began to shift from traditional medical service delivery to holistic, strategic approaches to actually solving its problems. During my fifth year of medicine, as I was heading the student organization, my father suffered from a heart attack at work and died. He was heading a military hospital, yet, received no medical care! This was the pivotal moment when I realized my purpose: To fix illnesses of the healthcare system. 

I studied healthcare quality, and during a short vacation from my master's program in international healthcare systems management in Austria, I got the chance to participate in the Egyptian uprising. This defined the core foundation of my organization: A belief in people. That, if given the proper tools, every person is capable of actively participating in decision-making. The solution is always in the hands of the key stakeholders. We just need to create the tools and to listen. My organization, Shamseya is the embodiment of that. The iCheck project takes this patient-centered care to the next level.

In Egypt: 

1 million suffer from preventable blindness.
3 millions are visually impaired.
26.3% of people are hypertensive. 
All of those, in addition to elderly people, diabetics, children with visual impairments and glaucoma patients are in need of regular eye investigations to take place every 2 years at most!

Data from the biggest provider of ophthalmology services in Cairo reveal that:
• Over 80% of patients are traveling,
• Average waiting list for services: 2 weeks

A quick review of the situation in Africa reveals a more dire need for solutions. Some countries are completely lacking investigative ophthalmologists!  

Shamseya is a problem solver to challenges facing healthcare. In a country where up to 73% of total healthcare costs are out-of-pocket; Shamseya creates and implements solutions that are participatory, patient-centered and integrate social and technological innovation to empower patients and ensure their access to quality and affordable healthcare. 

Following our work for years on tackling eye health in underserved settings, through the Mateegy Neshoof project and our collaborations with most ophthalmology service providers in Egypt, we have developed iCheck.

iCheck offers a set of integrated technologies and management models that enable us to provide highly specialized investigative ophthalmology services anywhere, live, efficiently and accurately!

We create people-centered, tech-based solutions to healthcare problems that are rarely tackled, such as:

1) Community-based assessments for healthcare services through training community leaders to conduct mystery-assessments that we publish on our platforms: Eghospitals.com, Youth Friendly Services and Salametna.com which enables assessment of infection prevention measures in public places in Egypt and Tunisia.

2) Melior: Our patients-experience-management technology that enables patients to voice their feedback or complaints on the healthcare services they received. 

3) Promoting gender equality and accessibility of services through Women Friendly Services.

4) Influencing decision makers and stakeholders through advocacy and research such as assessing healthcare interventions.

iCheck is one of these projects that exceeded 2 years to prepare. It is designed to promote access to healthcare services that are scarce in most regions, though necessary for large populations. This is not your typical telemedicine solution that relies on patients with the resources, mobile literacy and connectivity. Patients receive services at local clinics the way they are used to. Technology is put to use to enable consultants to carry out the investigations from remote locations, live. They can see and control the local equipment and give live instructions to local doctors or technicians.

The services that we offer are all patient-centered and focused on promoting better healthcare services to patients regardless of their income-level, social class or gender. 

Every intervention we make takes us one step closer to improving healthcare services and ensuring that patients have access to the services that they deserve. 

Despite the global challenge of COVID-19, in 2020 we have managed to achieve the following impact:

• Providing consultancy services for 50 healthcare providers to integrate patients voice and provide better medical services.
• Providing free services for 108 NGOs to promote the health of their target populations. 
• Helping 425 patients receive needed medical services. 
• Helping 3697 people reach medical diagnosis. 
• Assessing 691 hospitals to help people find the best places to attain healthcare services. 

The effectiveness of our approach can be proven through the testimonials and success stories of our clients and beneficiaries. Our team has managed to help hundreds attain free healthcare services that changed lives.

iCheck has been operating in 3 pilot facilities for a few months now. It managed to provide diagnostic services to patients during COVID-19 and the restrictions it imposed on mobility. Ensuring early, accurate diagnosis and proper management of their conditions.

Through our work, we enabled 5,419 individuals to access the healthcare services they needed. We also enabled 3778 individuals to reach an accurate medical diagnosis and the suitable treatment for their conditions. Additionally, in the past 6 months, 2.5 million people viewed the informative videos we created to provide the needed information on how to access and use the  healthcare coverage schemes people are entitled to. Our healthcare navigation web portals have helped 19,570 patients with the information they needed on healthcare facilities’ and their assessments.

As for iCheck, the service was launched only a couple of months ago, yet we currently provide eye investigations to over 265 patients per month: A number that is rising by 37% every month.

By the end of this year our plan is to reach 2,500 patients per month and throughout the upcoming year, our plan is to directly serve 5,200 per month. This is based on our current partnerships, resources and pipeline, however, if we do receive the Elevate Prize our reach would at least triple due to the significant increase in the technical and financial resources and would allow us to reach communities who are completely underserved.

Our impact goals are in alignment with SDGs 3, 5, 10 and 17. Our goal since we started working on the Egyptian healthcare system was to reach a functional healthcare system that accounts for the scarce resources. A system that is designed and managed by citizens, possesses the flexibility to adapt to each community’s preferences, guarantees work sustainability and pushes towards accountability to citizens, enabling universal health coverage through local ownership and improving service quality through regulated market dynamics.

Each of our projects contributes in a way to achieving this impact through increasing accountability, ensuring access to affordable healthcare, promoting gender equality, and increasing access to information.

Our progress is measured through several qualitative and quantitative methods as follows:

1-The number of people we serve and help attain healthcare services.

2-The number of direct support services we provide to healthcare service providers.

3-The number of people visiting our online platforms and services’ assessment websites to benefit from the data we gathered and content aimed at raising awareness.

4-The amount of money saved for patients who received healthcare services.

5-Enhanced quality of services in our direct support services to our clients and partner local facilities and healthcare service providers.

The challenges that we face, are working on addressing and will use the Elevate Prize to overcome, can be summarised as follows:

1- The lack of transparency and sufficient data on healthcare in Egypt and Africa.

- We address this through creating assessment tools, conducting primary research and disseminating our own studies to bridge this gap and make an informed impact.

2- The deeply enshrined idea of donating / contributing to charity organisations for immediate relief instead of contributing to sustainable solutions that would benefit more people and result in a bigger impact.

- We have been working on raising public awareness on the importance of having sustainable impact through online and offline awareness campaigns. Our solutions constitute replicable models that serve as a basis for alternative narratives on how we can support our communities, sustainably.

3- The need to grow a bigger network of donors/partners/individuals in order to increase the impact of our work.

-We have already begun increasing our partnerships and reaching out to new organisations, and we are certain that gaining access to the network of Elevate Prize will take us to another level of networking.

This type of assistance is currently crucial; as everything has become digitalised, there’s a pressing need to build a strong online presence and brand identity. We are already working on increasing our online presence to reach more people, yet, we are still lacking the expertise on how to use our online platforms in the most effective manner.

Additionally, the majority of our audience is located in Egypt, benefiting from our services, yet they barely contribute to our growth plans or fundraising initiatives. Gaining access to a new audience would take our work to another level and increase opportunities for more comprehensive partnerships. 

Egyptians do volunteer, contribute and donate millions to charity organizations working in various fields. However, we would need your tailored media campaigns in order to attract stakeholders to sustainable development and to change the mentality of only accepting one way of charity work, despite it not being the most effective, efficient or impactful one. 

Finally, we believe our solutions are scalable and replicable in the contexts of hundreds of countries and communities. Your support would enable us to make these solutions reach their true potential and benefit a global community of stakeholders with unmet healthcare needs and struggles.

Our team’s profiles, orientations and backgrounds organically embody these values in our organisation. We don't have preferences in choosing candidates to work with us except their compatibility, skills, values and experience. In an Egyptian context where most employers have clear biases in gender/religion/class/background/age, we welcome everyone on board. As a result, 62% of our core team and 83% of our community fieldworkers are women. We can confidently say that we’re one of the few places in the country in-which employees are free to be themselves and discuss their beliefs openly without being judged or punished for it, a small example is that our employees have various and unpopular political/religious beliefs which can and is used against employees in many organisations but in Shamseya we focus on our work and make sure to provide a safe environment for all our employees.

In addition, our projects focus on achieving equity, diversity and inclusion as follows:

-Our research and advocacy work on increasing accessibility, affordability and accountability in healthcare.

-Our youth and women friendly services’ projects promote inclusivity for marginalized groups in the MENA region. 

-Most of our social impact projects target underserved communities.

The team consists of doctors, healthcare systems experts, managers, youth mobilisation specialists, researchers, social scientists, technology experts and developers, designers and others. This ensures a multi-disciplinary approach to all our solutions. I have extensive experience in participatory healthcare and community mobilisation, and my partner, Daniel, has been leading the biggest community projects that Shamseya has been delivering. Each of our team of problem-solvers comes from a different professional and educational backgrounds, bringing fresh perspectives to create the best impact. 

Regarding iCheck, we have mobilized a team of highly specialized investigative ophthalmology consultants that are currently working with our pilot facilities and who are ready for the project’s scale-up.

When we start a project, we always start by doing on-ground research through our team of field workers and local partners. We carry out focus group discussions, surveys and interviews with samples representing our target populations. In anything we do at Shamseya, we function by a simple principle: Our belief in PEOPLE. We believe every person is an expert in his/her own needs and, if given the proper tools, is best equipped to design the most practical solutions. As problem-solvers we learn each day to master the skill of listening.

The establishment of Shamseya as a non-profit social enterprise in Egypt constituted a challenge in itself. Having the audacity to pivot from a donations-dependent charity to a self-sustained problem-solver, functioning and getting the proper registration wasn’t an easy task. Operating with limited resources, an initial team of 2 and a most disruptive model, forged our organization and allowed us a steady organic growth.

In 2020, as we were celebrating 18 full-timers and a pipeline of projects that put us on the path to our vision, a team-mate got randomly stopped on his way to the office by a plain-clothed policeman. His phone was forcibly checked and he was detained for almost a year, without trials, for a couple of posts he shared on facebook! Two months after his detention, COVID-19 completely stopped all of our ongoing projects which were dependent on hospital visits and field work. Nevertheless, we managed to direct our problem-solving to address defects COVID-19 made clear in our healthcare system and iCheck was launched and put to action. Today, our colleague is released, we have become a resilient organization and iCheck is making a critical difference in how healthcare is delivered during COVID-19 and beyond.

1- Egypt Faces the Pandemic: Health and Economic Effects

2- Strengthening community participation in healthcare in Egypt: Ayman Sabae & Shamseya

3- Palliative Care

4- Face to Face with the Fellows: Ayman Sabae

5- #WhatNow: What did healthcare learn from the pandemic?

6- Building Healthtech Startups for the Future

7- Promoting Transparency in Egypt's Health Sector

Elevate prize will equip us with the needed resources that will allow the team to focus on what is more important which is implementation, delivering impact and achieving sustainability. 

Through Elevate prize, we would be able to launch iCheck Services in locations ranging between 7-10  new locations, this means 7-10 areas will have services that they never had. This will enable thousands of patients to access high quality eye health services, scaling up the project and speeding up the expansion process. 

The skills and areas elevate prize would support us in, will empower us to unlock new horizons and potentials to reach communities that are in dire need for our support.

We have a network of 60 local NGOs operating in most of the Egyptian cities, we work with them to train community leaders, health assessors, provide healthcare solutions for their beneficiaries and conduct fieldwork research with their target population. We also work with healthcare facilities based on their needs, we provide needs assessments, management support, capacity building and patient-feedback services. Moreover, we work with international organizations such as GIZ, International Alert, Transparency International and the World health Organization on various research and social impact projects.

Generally speaking, our partnership model is participatory, we aim to be of value to partners not by doing everything ourselves but through engaging them and having a mutual learning process through which our partners get to learn how to do new things on their own. We believe it is crucial to have various stakeholders with the capabilities to do the work in order to magnify the impact instead of considering our knowledge and experience an exclusive asset that should not be shared with others.