With the challenges encountered in getting access to health care services, from government facilities, more people appear to be going the way of seeking health care solutions from private practices.
However, even with the proliferation of these practices, there are challenges with the availability of adequate medical facilities and locations to administer health care services.
In a chat with Debo Odulana the Founder of Doctoora – who is also a medical doctor and management consultant – we learnt how Dooctora is reviving Africa’s healthcare system.
Doctoora provides healthcare facilities and technology to health professionals within its network on a rental basis, allowing them to start and manage their practice with ease.
This way, Doctoora ‘s online marketplace offers health consumers access to on-demand care from its vetted network of health professionals and a library of health information content.
Debo took us through how Doctoora is providing a virtual private practice solution to health professionals by enabling them with tools to deliver healthcare services on the go.
Why Doctoora ?
So for us, it was a case of ensuring that affordable health care is close to as many people as possible. We realized the major problem and also not exactly that the services are at affordable rates at the location where people want them.
We’ve been working on how to improve the distribution of healthcare services while also considering how to also meet the financial impact on the cost of health care for the people.
An overview of the Nigerian health care system?
So, some key point about our health system management in Nigeria is that it’s a system built to cater to the needs of 200 million people.
Primarily, 80 million of those people are spending less than $6 a year on health care and a majority of the payment are out of pocket payments.
We have a primary health care system, secondary and tertiary health care system with a lot of issues with care provision because health care has become too political, as well as infrastructure distribution challenges, so with us, we are trying to figure out how to penetrate this.
Another thing to add is that insurance is very low such that less than 10% of the overall population have access to health insurance or any cover from health care.
So up to 70% of the money that is spent is coming directly from people’s pockets. There is the problem of majority of the health care services, concentrated in the highbrow areas.
So for advanced health care services, you would have to pay a lot of money because these services are also paying their rent
So there’s a lot of disintegration in the system with government facilities recording long queues and waiting times as well, are fully and significantly occupied, with queues and waiting times for healthcare is significantly longer as well.
So this system here, while it really has the opportunity and potential to deliver services, a major problem is that the resources, infrastructure, and resources are not available at the places where they are needed.
We are also facing a significant amount of workforce shortages. So we don’t have the workforce to deliver the necessary healthcare services, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, community health workers.
The doctor to patient ratio, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) should be one to 600 and we are nowhere close to one to 1000.
So we barely have 35,000 doctors in the country and this was the number that was announced say the last three years.
Doctors and nurses are leaving the country, on a monthly basis, it’s like a massive exodus of health care providers and we are not producing enough to replace them.
The system is really a system that is masked with a lot of issues, if you look at the pharmaceutical supply chains, as well, we have a lot of issues with dependency on foreign medication and a lot of importation as well as not having enough local production as well.
How is a Doctoora helping with private health practice?
So for us, we decided to build a new health system from scratch by aggregating services that are very affordable, then we take a step further, by aligning all the services together, into patient pathways.
Patient pathways that we’re talking about are what would make it easier for patients to be able to access health care, as an example, we know that it might be possible for a patient to see a dermatologist in location x and then get whatever investigations he needs at a facility in location y before heading home.
With the platform, the patient plans his or her health care journey without having to visit a physical location.
Streamlining and making things a lot easier and affordable, saving less time when it comes to surgical practices as well.
So how, are we making all of this happen? We are essentially going from place to place in terms of existing medical facilities and we are assessing their unused capacity.
Now the unused capacity can be utilized because they don’t have enough clients to use it, meaning that the place is fully equipped, but there are no clients available.
There can also be a case of the facility being unused because it is dilapidated and clients don’t want to attend.
So for different cases, we have different approaches, for the dilapidated case we go into an approach to revamp the place and increase the number of services that can be generated while working with the owner of the place to get more clientele and sell off the slots and making some revenue out of that.
In the case, where the place is fully equipped, and the owner is running it well, but they’re not having footfalls we are buying out some of that spare capacity in bulk and selling to our users.
So it’s either we’re selling the physical facilities to the health professionals, which are our clients. These are health professionals who want to rent our facilities for their private practice.
So our platform allows these kinds of people to be able to start their private practice without having any setup costs.
For instance, a doctor who needs to get started with private practice, will register and get verified, once the doctor is authenticated, he or she can start using any of our facilities on a per pay user basis.
More like Air bnb for medical practice, so a health professional leveraging Doctoora ‘s facility can post his or schedule online for people searching to book for a doctor
The doctor can also set schedules for home visits and teleconsultations while using Doctoora for physical engagement, so our online platform allows professionals to have what we call practice management tools that they use to build their practice as well as easily manage patients, online medical records, appointments scheduling system, in-platform messaging.
For someone who has a building, Doctoora is able to use the platform to upload your healthcare facility so that other people can rent and Doctoora can use it.
And we’re extending that to enable people who don’t have facilities to be able to invest in medical equipment.
For instance, we want to be able to have a place that can offer scan, admission and surgical services. We also need to deliver consultation, run laboratories and pharmacy services.
So someone who isn’t a health professional, but for instance owns an ultrasound scan machine can place it at any of our locations, so the individual is making money from the medical space without being a health professional or owning a physical location for health practice.
So our goal really is not to be a healthcare chain, we are trying to create a health system that is financed and “owned by users”.
So we run a system, where people join Doctoora by buying memberships and then you can now top up with credits to buy services across the network.
This sort of creates a funding pool that helps these different facility owners and providers stay afloat because what we’re doing is actually buying the services from them on behalf of the people and using data to decide what service to buy and what not to buy.
Will there be a point, where Nigeria will leverage the power of technology to improve the country’s healthcare system?
Well, it’s starting slowly almost everyone is going online now, at least some states that are forward such as Lagos has telemedicine as one of its offerings even though it’s outsourced.
They’ve started digitizing some of the health facilities and setting up Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in places like FMC Ebutte Metta, which is fully tech-enabled and it is probably the best Governments center in Lagos now.
So, it’s, it’s, it’s a case of time and how people really react, so the more people react, the easier it is for adoption to occur.
Featured Image: Debo Odulana, Founder, Doctoora
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