Our 2019 Cohort applicant cycle is over and we've found 10 great organizations to join us!
Every year our team dedicates a substantial amount of time and resources to source, scout, and recruit the best healthcare organizations from around the world. As a result, we’ve selected ten growth-ready organizations to support, continuing to drive impactful work that ensures diverse populations have access to affordable, high-quality care.
This year’s applicant pool represented global healthcare organizations operating in 109 countries. These organizations span multiple healthcare focus areas, legal structures, business models, care delivery settings, and funding mechanisms. That said, let’s meet the 2019 innovators and find out why they stand out as the best healthcare organizations in this year’s application cycle. In alphabetical order they are:
Care 2 Communities
Headquarters: United States (Non-Profit)
Operating Country: Haiti
Highlights: Care delivery, government partnership, strong impact data
Problem: Care 2 Communities is tackling the dire issue that only 23 percent of Haitians, including five percent of the rural population, have access to high-quality primary care. In addition, the Ministry of Health’s national network of community clinics is critically under-resourced and mismanaged.
Solution: Care 2 Communities has developed a public-private partnership to rehabilitate these public clinics. Their model is able to leverage the existing government resources, such as the clinic building and staff, and rehabilitate the operational systems necessary for high-quality primary care. The Care 2 Communities model reduces the cost to consumer by an average of 15 percent compared to government prices, increases quality by 30 percent using the government quality rankings, and operates at 90 percent cost recovery.
Website: Care 2 Communities
Carepay
Headquarters: Kenya (For-Profit)
Operating Countries: Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania
Highlights: Health financing, technology, government partnership
Problem: CarePay addresses a significant problem Kenya faces: low insurance penetration. This is largely attributed to the lack of trust between insurance providers and users, which leads to large out-of-pocket payments. In total, this has caused more than one million people to return to poverty.
Solution: As a result, CarePay developed the M-TIBA platform, which directs funds from public and private funders directly to patients into a “health wallet” on their mobile phone. These funds are restricted to conditional spending at select healthcare providers, which helps address fraud. With every transaction they combine a digital payment with real time medical and financial data collection, making healthcare safer and more transparent for both patients and providers. Automating claims management, reducing fraud, and capturing analytics from the data allows CarePay Kenya to reduce cost while increasing access to and quality of healthcare.
Website: CarePay
MiracleFeet
Headquarters: United States (Non-Profit)
Operating Countries: Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Guatemala, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Paraguay, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe
Highlights: Care delivery, health technology and product, capacity building, geographical diversity
Problem: MiracleFeet works to combat clubfoot, a common birth defect causing one or both feet to turn inwards and upwards, making it nearly impossible to walk properly. This condition affects one in every 800 children worldwide, 90 percent of them in countries with limited access to proper treatment.
Solution: MiracleFeet is revolutionizing clubfoot treatment, making it cheaper and more efficient. The first way they are tackling the problem is through a high-quality, low-cost brace for use in low and middle income countries. MiracleFeet also teamed up with tech company Dimagi to develop a mobile app called CAST which simplifies data collection during treatment and facilitates communication with families via phone or SMS.
Website: MiracleFeet
RubiconMD
Headquarters: United States (For-Profit)
Operating Countries: Spain, United States
Highlights: Health workforce training, technology, primary and specialty care
Problem: A double paradox in healthcare is that 40 percent of visits to specialists are unnecessary and at the same time, more than half of the U.S. population faces significant barriers accessing specialty care. The challenge ends up falling on the shoulders of primary care providers, who don’t have experience in treating specialty-care issues.
Solution: RubiconMD decided to solve this challenge by supporting primary care providers (PCPs) with access to specialists’ expertise via electronic consults (eConsults). eConsults are not telemedicine and they're not patient facing; rather, they let PCPs ask questions to top specialists and receive insights in a few hours. This results in significant improvement in their care plans, avoidance of unnecessary referrals and tests, and much faster access to the right care plan for the patient. PCPs using RubiconMD report that eConsults result in a significant improvement of the care plan 80 percent of the time and avoid unnecessary steps (referrals, diagnostics, procedures) 52 percent of the time. They have also quantified the savings generated to be between $300 and $800 per consult.
Website: RubiconMD
SystemOne
Headquarters: United States (For-Profit)
Operating Countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guinea, India, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe
Highlights: Health technology, systems support, geographical diversity
Problem: Developed countries pour billions of dollars annually into global health - $26 billion in tuberculosis and HIV alone - to manage infectious diseases and avert the next pandemic in lower and middle-income countries (LMICs). Clinical effectiveness and operational returns from these investments are near-impossible to measure and many stakeholders question the value, not able to see what works and what doesn’t.
Solution: SystemOne has created a solution that enables the global health community to turn on the lights in a critical and expensive system. Their IoT (Internet of Things) diagnostic devices enable rapid response to outbreaks and visibility into performance, inventory management, user training and more in difficult-to-reach, bandwidth-constrained geographies rife with infectious disease. While SystemOne gained traction by doing the hard work of connecting devices, its primary value is in the software platform that moves and interprets the data: Aspect. The Aspect software platform allows rapid linkage of diagnosed patients to treatment, ongoing validation and evaluation of investments in equipment, unique visibility into disease hotspots, and rapid adjustment of health investments.
Website: SystemOne
ThinkMD
Headquarters: United States (For-Profit)
Operating Countryies: Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, United States, Zambia
Highlights: Care delivery, health workforce training, technology, geographical diversity
Problem: Nearly 16,000 children die every day from treatable clinical conditions, and while countries have made great strides in decreasing child mortality, at least 30 countries must at least double their current rate of reduction to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal target of reducing under-5 mortality. A major barrier in increasing healthcare delivery is a growing lack of healthcare professionals to identify children who are sick and recommend appropriate early therapeutic intervention. To address the growing shortage of healthcare professionals, governments worldwide are expanding their frontline health workforce to deliver care in the community and partnering with the private sector to use technology to solve access and delivery problems.
Solution: As a result, ThinkMD developed MEDSINC, a tool used by community health workers (CHWs) that utilizes clinical intelligence algorithms to assess, triage, and recommend treatments for children to their caregivers. The DATASINC platform then visualizes and analyzes that data and provides it to governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to better plan for healthcare initiatives locally, regionally, and globally.
Website: ThinkMD
TNH Health
Headquarters: Brazil (For-Profit)
Operating in Country: Brazil
Highlights: Care Delivery, Technology, Mobile Health
Problem: Because of poor primary care access, Brazil is plagued by significant overuse of their emergency rooms, higher rates of hospitalizations, and lack of informational resources for mothers and caregivers.
Solution: As a result, TNH created chatbots that serve as “virtual nurse assistants” to help educate and monitor thousands of patients at once. The bot does a great job of engaging patients (sending tips, reminders, quizzes, images, videos, etc.), and the more that the patient interacts with it, the more personalized the content becomes. If the patient reports a problematic symptom or behavior that the bot cannot resolve, then an alert is sent to the health care practitioner who can conduct an asynchronous chat to resolve the issue or direct the patient to seek treatment. With the use of our AI-powered bots, a single health care practitioner can monitor upwards of 4,000 patients at once, and do so with substantial frequency and quality. The cost per patient drops upwards of 10 times.
Website: TNH Health
Twiage
Headquarters: United States (For-Profit)
Operating in Countries: United States, Brazil
Highlights: Health technology, emergency care, geographical diversity
Problem: In many places around the world, paramedics and physicians still rely on antiquated radio transmissions over public channels filled with static and interference to communicate about incoming patient conditions. Without a patient name, EKG, photo or video, diagnosis is often delayed until the patient arrives, leading to wasted time and costly delays in treatment.
Solution: Twiage provides novel pre-hospital communication and intra-hospital care coordination technology, enabling hospitals and emergency medical services (EMS) to accelerate life-saving emergency care by reducing the reliance on radio communication. EMS professionals can use Twiage's free and HIPAA-compliant app to send notifications with patient vital signs, symptoms, and interventions to hospitals within seconds. The app also allows for first responders to record video of a patient’s stroke symptoms and send EKGs, medication list, and trauma scenes in photos with additional details in text chats and digital voice memos. It also allows hospital ER and service line staff to communicate with EMS providers on a single secured platform.
Website: Twiage
Vezeeta
Headquarters: Egypt (For-Profit)
Operating in Countries: Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia
Highlights: Care delivery, health technology, geographical diversity
Problem: The Middle East and Northern Africa are currently experiencing three critical problems in their healthcare industry: difficulty finding and booking the right provider; weak medical record usage and lack of information; and weakly-informed and engaged patients on disease management and medical prescriptions.
Solution: As a result, Vezeeta is scaling rapidly and has developed a system where patients are able to search, compare, and book the best doctors in the region through a consumer-facing web app and mobile app. Vezeeta also provides innovative practice management and electronic medical records solutions to hospitals and clinics to manage appointments and patient data. Lastly, Vezeeta has developed a patient engagement tool that personalizes medical education as per each patients' needs in addition to medical prescriptions.
Website: Vezeeta
Wellthy Therapeutics
Headquarters: India (For-Profit)
Operating in Country: India
Highlights: Health technology, artificial technology
Problem: India is on the cusp of a massive change in disease patterns. Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which accounted for a mere 30 percent of the disease burden in 1990, now account for over 55 percent of the total disease burden. Developing country health systems are primarily designed to address infectious diseases, neonatal and maternal mortality, however, they are not equipped to address NCDs at a large-scale.
Solution: Wellthy Therapeutics is Asia’s only for-prescription digital therapeutic. Using a synergistic combination of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and human interventions, they help users prevent chronic health conditions or manage control of their existing conditions by engaging with more than 10,000 individuals per month. Since Wellthy launched in 2015, they have published clinical evidence of their outcomes in leading scientific journals and are the only digital diabetes intervention to be endorsed by the Asia Diabetes Association.
Website: Wellthy Therapuetics