January 26, 2023
Through the Bayer Foundation-funded Digital Health Ecosystem (DHE) project and in partnership with PATH, Medic launched the Community Health Toolkit Entrepreneurship Accelerator (CHTEA). With a two-year, €2 million investment from Bayer Foundation, we will advance the broad use of the CHT as an open-source platform, aid local entrepreneurs and software developers by enabling faster and wider adoption of new tools, ensuring the sustainability of those tools, and make it easier to adapt the tools in response to health system needs.
The CHTEA will provide a cohort experience for onboarding and learning and support burgeoning community members as they establish themselves as skilled builders on the CHT. The CHTEA also provides an opportunity to attract co-investment from additional stakeholders to establish CHTEAs within funder target geographies or across the global CHT community. Technical organisations participating in the CHTEA will benefit from Medic’s expertise in the digital health ecosystem, community health systems, human-centered design, app building, and product development, in addition to an existing library of training materials. Medic will lead curriculum development and all capacity building training sessions and associated activities.
“One billion people alive today will never see a doctor in their lifetime. System strengthening and system reform are needed at unprecedented scale to ensure people can access the care they need. Investments like Bayer Foundation’s, and projects like DHE can really catalyze the pace of reform.”
Dykki Settle, PATH’s Chief Digital Officer and Director of its Center of Digital and Data Excellence and member of Medic’s Board of Directors
With successful graduation from the CHTEA, organizations will be fully equipped to build on the CHT, certified as a CHT technical solution provider, and primed to support new business opportunities as a supplement to their independent business development.
Four Africa-based organizations were awarded with funding in this inaugural cohort to expand their digital health tools for community health and explore sustainable business models.
This funding aims to support these entrepreneurs to collectively build solutions using a common, open-source platform the Community Health Toolkit (CHT). With this funding, the award winners can leverage a proven, economically viable digital foundation for their digital tools while also receiving concerted organizational strengthening and business planning support.
Most importantly, the four award-winning entrepreneurs are creating tools that will enable health care workers to improve the quality, speed, and access for equitable care to their communities.
PATH was integral in working with Medic and Bayer Foundation to develop a granting program to help identify these candidate CHTEA participants and disburse and administer the grant funding, leveraging PATH’s Digital Square project’s Global Goods Investment Process.
“One billion people alive today will never see a doctor in their lifetime. System strengthening and reform are needed at unprecedented scale to ensure people can access the care they need.”
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Meet the inaugural cohort of entrepreneurs
Posh IT provides cutting edge technology that supports health sector workflow with a focus on community health. They likewise provide support to the Kenyan government and other Kenyan health institutions by increasing human resource capacity to better deploy and use digital health technologies. In partnership with Medic, Posh IT will fully onboard to the CHT to serve as a technical partner to help others build, integrate, and maintain apps on the CHT. This includes capacity building in app design, development, and site reliability engineering.
In partnership with PATH, Posh IT will develop a business plan for providing deployment partners with ongoing technical support, hardware, and maintenance services.
Guild Digital has built and supported the use of a Community Health Management Information System designed specifically to address strategic and operational gaps in refugee communities and for humanitarian health emergencies in Uganda.
With DHE funding, Guild Digital will build an application specifically for use by humanitarian response supervisors so that they can support village health teams in settlements. Through an existing relationship with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Uganda, Guild Digital will be able to field test and rollout the new application. Coupling that with sharing the settlement workflows with the CHT community, the supervisor tool will be well-poised to scale throughout Uganda and to other countries. Guild Digital with work with PATH on ways to explore financial and organizational sustainability by leveraging this possible expansion of their business.
Brink Innovation is a digital design and consulting firm based in Nairobi, Kenya. They design products and services to optimize performance, manage change, innovate, and achieve impact across multiple sectors, including health. In partnership with Medic, Brink Innovation will onboard onto the CHT to support additional counties in the roll out of the Kenyan Electronic Community Health Information System (eCHIS). This will allow Brink Innovation to become a fully-fledged CHT technical partner. Brink Innovation and PATH will also facilitate business-to-government and business-to-business engagements to strengthen Brink Innovation’s financial sustainability.
IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited is a Kenyan company that focuses on designing, developing, implementing, supporting, and maintaining health-enabled digital technology solutions, particularly for low- and middle-income countries. IntelliSOFT developed Mama’s Hub, a Maternal Health Information System with the digital/electronic Mother and Child Booklet to support collection, analysis, and dissemination of maternal health data at the facility level. Through the DHE project, IntelliSOFT will further develop the Mama’s Hub materials and documentation to guide integration into eCHIS. IntelliSOFT will also develop a pharmacovigilance module for CHT and prepare a scaling and sustainability plan for IntelliSOFT as a whole.