Pay exact medical bills remotely
Platform promises transparency.(inset) Mr Alain Wandji.
If you happen to have lived in the diaspora or even in the city and had relatives back home counting on you to send money for upkeep or other urgent needs such as medication, then you probably have encountered a situation where, after sending the money, you received a call claiming the money you sent was not enough.
Some cases are genuine, however, in some, the money you sent just wasn’t used for the intended purpose.
While living in the US, Serge-Alain Wandji a healthcare provider, would often come across frustrated people who would ask him how he would deal with such a situation diplomatically. For a long time, he had no answer, until finally, it dawned on him that he could leverage his background in healthcare with his background in e-commerce to develop a product that would enable individuals living in the diaspora to pay only for genuine medical bills of their beneficiaries remotely.
“With the help of my co-founder and some developers, we developed a tool that works in such a way that when one visits a medical facility or a pharmacy, instead of the patient receiving an invoice, the invoice is sent to the platform, and once the supporter receives it, he or she is able to make payment directly to the facility,” noted Wandji.
Receiving customers
Benefactors and beneficiaries would not be charged to use the platform, service providers, however, would be required to pay a fee to use it, as they would be receiving customers who ordinarily would not see them. To guarantee the safety of patients, they would only target medical facilities that are legally registered and licensed to operate.
“If the pharmacy is on our platform, you are guaranteed that regardless of its location, it is accredited. That way you are sure your patient is safe,” noted the businessman.
The platform, which currently is active in Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana, with plans to venture into Uganda and Congo, also targets people residing in the city, who would want to pay a bill for beneficiaries residing in the rural areas.
“Traditionally, due to presence of very few credible pharmacies in the rural areas, most people would rely on public transport courier systems to ship drugs from the city to their loved ones in the rural areas. These couriers, however, are generally not concerned with proper handling of medicine. Our platform displays to benefactors in the city a list of the accredited pharmacies to purchase medicine from in the rural areas,” explains Peter Kamunyu, the regional director of DiaspoCare.
The product would certainly help to solve many challenges in access to medical care, however, getting it to the market was difficult because just like many other digital innovations, getting people to trust that it would be safe to transact through the platform was not easy.
“There are so many products being marketed digitally nowadays, some not entirely credible, so, some ask, if I send my money through DiaspoCare, will it be safe?” notes Kamunyu.
They, therefore, had to visit service providers as well as benefactors physically, and demonstrate how the tool worked. This increased their cost of marketing.
“Reaching the last mile has been a challenge because deploying a marketing team to just one facility in the grassroots could cost up to Sh10, 000, so you can imagine how much it would cost to deploy a team all over the country,” says Kamunyu, pointing out that beneficiaries that would receive money for medication directly from their benefactors are also slowing down its uptake, as a majority of them are generally not vouching for it.
Generally, benefactors send more money than the actual medical bill to their beneficiaries, therefore, if, say, a bill came to Sh2, 300, they would be led to believe that it is more, say Sh3,000, therefore, to keep on receiving the money, some beneficiaries would rather tell their benefactors that the platform does not work. Out of 10, we may have only two or three beneficiaries say that the platform is good,” says Kamunyu.
To date, they have on-boarded around 3,000 benefactors (some of whom have more than one beneficiary), 3,500 beneficiaries, and about 2,600 service providers who include pharmacists, dentists and opticians.
