Rubi Health

Rare diseases are increasingly being recognized within nations and globally as a public-health priority. In the African context, the needs of people living with rare diseases must also be balanced with basic needs, such as nutrition and communicable-disease prevention. Although rare diseases individually have low prevalence, the estimated combined prevalence is 6–8% of the population. Most rare diseases have genetic associations and are often severely debilitating, impairing physical and mental abilities and shortening life expectancy. Often rare diseases are chronic and life-threatening. Aside from lifestyle factors, the lack of access to quality healthcare exacerbates the silent epidemic of rare and chronic illnesses. In addition to this, there is a lack of a connected care ecosystem that brings various stakeholders together on the same platform. Such a platform allows for continuous tracking and feedback. A tech-driven solution is thus required to solve for care quality in rare disease management. 

What are the issues with rare and chronic disease management in Africa? 

Poor healthcare infrastructure aside, challenges facing rare and chronic disease management are as follows – 

1.Low adherence rates due to disconnected care mechanisms and high out-of-pocket expenditure. 

2.An unorganized market without a single layer unifying various stakeholders; and 

3.Lack of solutions that lend to continuous monitoring and real-time intervention. 

Rubi Health is a disease management platform currently catering to over 5000 Nigerians, working towards improving health outcomes for rare and chronic disease patients by making care autonomous and predictive and enabling disease-specific guidance, continuous monitoring, and real-time support from doctors. Rubi Health is built around the core philosophy of wanting to improve the quality of life of patients and make a difference in the way that tracking and intervention happen with rare and chronic diseases.

We currently have two products: patient side, and doctor side. 

For patients, we give them a sense of their everyday health and handhold them through the process of understanding their first symptoms, getting prescribed a treatment plan, and recording their ongoing lifestyle changes. We help map and manage those lifestyle changes at a fundamental level, while giving them intelligent insights to help them make small tangible changes to everyday habits. We also connect them to doctors in a more real-time manner, so doctors have deep visibility into a patient’s health, and the patients can get personalized recommendations from doctors. 

While our focus is on preventive and personalized care, we have some value-added services that ease our users’ journey. They can participate in clinical research and trials, order medicines from the platform, schedule video consultations with doctors, and request lab tests directly. We’re building a broader health tech ecosystem where we are able to partner with the relevant companies — including some leading names in health device manufacturing, insurance companies, and medicine providers. 

For doctors, we’ve built a full product suite with a decision support system and EMR. So we’re able to help them digitize their practice, prioritize and process patient data, simplify clinic management and build better relationships with their patients. 

Overall, Rubi Health’s platform unifies access to various aspects of healthcare encompassing researchers, medicines, diagnostics, consultations, insurance, devices, etc., thus creating a care ecosystem for the patient that improves convenience and adherence. 

Rubi Health is on a mission to give everyone suffering from rare illnesses and chronic diseases worldwide a better quality of life starting with Africa. There are approximately 7,000 rare diseases known globally and 95 percent are without approved treatment. More importantly, more than 4B people currently suffer from one chronic condition or a combination. Rubi Health is building a unified operating system to deliver continuous, personalized, and predictive care via a continuous feedback loop between researchers, doctors, patients, & every other healthcare support system, including pharmacies, devices, & delivery. 

At Rubi Health, our goal is to help rare and chronic Disease Patients to manage their ailments at lower cost and stay out of a hospital for as long as possible. We have demonstrated that this problem can be solved effectively at scale with digital solutions, a connected care ecosystem, IoT devices, and data.

My adventure into the rare and chronic disease space started in 2018 when I had my first child. He lost his ability to speak at 15 months, and until he is 4 now, couldn't speak, walk or control his body muscles. We have been struggling with the situation ever since and seeking answers. This experience gave me valuable insights into the rare disease management sector. For 4 years, I’ve applied hard & soft skills while navigating through a fast-paced & resource-constrained environment in a developing economy. That’s given me the talent, passion, enthusiasm, patience, and imagination to take on significant leadership & management responsibilities in this venture.

With me on this journey are people with vast experience in the field of medicine, and technology. As a core team of diverse individuals, each one bringing unique & complementary skills & experiences to the table, this combination of talent, expertise, high tolerance for ambiguity dedication & determination to impact the communities we serve & ability to take risks & experiment with new ideas are our greatest strengths. The values we share create a diversity that shall bring the best innovation. Our ability to relate to a wide array of people has empowered us with critical perspectives to impact human development. We believe in long-term involvement, and honest feedback on personal performance to take corrective actions and leverage each other's expertise. We'll continually create out-of-the-box ideas without being locked into the perceived existing solutions.

We are applying for an opportunity to get mentorship and also win funding which can significantly accelerate our development timeline. We are passionate about using technology as a tool to address real-time global challenges and particularly we are interested in finding new techniques to exploit current technologies to maximize treatment, information accessibility, and relevance for rare and chronic diseases.

This is the first time we would have a platform tackling the issues of rare and other chronic diseases at the same time and also giving the front role seat to issues affecting women in particular. In Africa, while there are players that are trying to solve for specific parts of the value chain / care continuum – i.e., devices, tests, data, doctors, etc., we have not seen a full-stack, comprehensive tech solution for this segment until Rubi Health. Given the sheer size of the problem, being early to build a holistic solution provides a massive opportunity to any company to build depth and be an integral part of a patient’s care journey. 

Rubi Health looks to impact the outcomes for both practitioner and patient. Our goal is quite ambitious. We break it down into several criteria by which

we will judge our overall success:
1. Continue to engage new users on the Rubi Health platform at a growth rate of 50% year-over-year increase in membership.
2. Doctors and researchers need reliable, compassionate support to help stem the tide of extreme attrition out of the profession due to stress, isolation, and exhaustion. Rubi Health's goal is an 85% retention rate of practitioners on the platform for each 12-month period.

3. Unite researchers, pharma, device manufacturers, NGOs, Ministries of Health, Colleges, Inventors, and all practitioners in one information-sharing hub.
4. Expedite innovation awareness globally.

The single largest barrier for Rubi Health is the public and industry perception that the organization is much better funded. The reality is we are still very much a scrappy start-up company looking to change the world. Our credibility and reputation in the industry belies our true infrastructure. A team of four people is responsible for all Rubi Health's accomplishments. Also, internet access is steadily increasing in developing countries, with 1 in 5 homes online. However, we must be able to create total inclusion for those on the fringes of rare and chronic diseases. By instituting an SMS campaign to send short, relevant messages we can obtain feedback and more complete results.

In some ways, we use an easy formula: product * number of uses = people impacted. Our social impact model takes each product/service sold and deployed and estimates the number of end-users impacted. We discount our calculations based upon a) whether the end-user provided some evidence that the product was actually used and b) some discounted rates of misuse or non-use. We also use customer feedback and reports from the field.

Rubi Health’s platform unifies access to various aspects of healthcare encompassing medicines, diagnostics, consultations, insurance, devices, research, etc., thus creating a care ecosystem for the patient that improves convenience and adherence. We do so with our “platform-as-a-service” play that brings together various stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Rubi Health is developing an extensive communication layer that unifies communication from customers from across a variety of modalities, including a web app, chatbot that interacts with native mobile texting, and voice-activated voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home. 

Rubi Health is developing a method to improve the consistency with which patients adhere to their prescription plans (“medication adherence”). Patient frustration with the pharmacy process contributes to delays or postponement of medication regimes, non-adherence, and in some cases prescription abandonment. Nonadherence is common. 110 million prescriptions are abandoned each year. For chronic disease patients, it is estimated that between 20% and 30% of prescriptions are never filled and up to 50% of medications are not taken as prescribed. We believe it is possible to identify which patients are more likely to become non-adherent. Rubi Health intends to utilize data analytics and machine learning to calculate the Rubi Health Medication Adherence Index, which will trigger additional communication and service protocols, such as additional text messages, phone calls from a pharmacist or coordination with a physician, to help improve medication adherence.

Overall, Rubi Health aspires to be the next big thing in the healthcare technology space. Our aim is to disrupt healthcare practice by introducing a unique combination of technology and data science which will have a profound impact on the well-being of billions of people across the globe. We strongly believe that we are building a solution that will produce a new wave of high-tech health applications.

Our team is open to everyone irrespective of age, colour, gender and orientation. Our goal is to bring people who would give everything to the work we do.

Rubi Health creates an ecosystem of patients, doctors, researchers, hospitals, health devices, insurance, and patient care service providers. Rubi Health relies on a B2B2C business model. We make money primarily through commissions and subscriptions. While a doctor receives 70% of the revenue from each consultation and treatment performed on the platform, Rubi Health gets 30%.

We are positioned for long-term sustainability because the $70B Rare and Chronic diseases management market remains under-explored and Rubi Health is currently one of the few players in the space. Our goal is to secure 500k in funding either via investment or lines of credit against receivables. That working capital will allow us to get to scale much more quickly. Our current financial projections show us reaching cash flow positive in 2024.