Improve Chronic Healthcare Access in Africa

Do you suffer from a chronic health condition (CHC) such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or know anyone who does? The truth is we all know someone who suffers from one of these. Our co-founders are all too familiar with this with Bai Bintou's mother passing away from diabetes and Mercy's mother struggling with diabetes. 

CHCs are on the rise in countries in sub-Saharan Africa and diabetes alone is projected to increase by 147% in the region by 2045. This rise in chronic diseases is furthering health disparities, with gaps in care centered around (1) lack of region-specific data to understand trends and provide contextualized guidelines, (2) Difficulty accessing health providers; in Ghana, where I’m from, patients with chronic disease wait 3-5 hours just to see a health provider for their concerns, most are unable to see health providers at all. 

GAPhealth Technologies Inc. is bridging the gap in chronic care by connecting patients to health providers, and by allowing patients to store their records right on the phone. Additionally, we believe that data and artificial intelligence(AI) have a huge potential to help us understand chronic health trends and positively impact the future of chronic health care. However the data available is simply not representative of the population, and we know that this can lead to AI biases which can negatively impact care. We are solving this by using patients’ data with their permission to create HIPAA compliant diverse datasets to understand and provide recommendations for these conditions.

We have built a minimum viable product which we are testing in Ghana, and plan to fully launch in Q3 of 2022. We are raising funding to scale up, optimize our prototype and expand our reach.

About the founders

Dr. Mercy Asiedu is a biomedical engineer and postdoctoral research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with 7+ years of experience in health tech innovation and global health, with specific expertise in medical devices, digital health, and machine learning. 

Bai Bintou Kaira is an MBA student at the University of Southern California. She is also a Chemical Engineer with 6+ years of experience in project management, data analysis, and change management

THANK YOU! For your contributions and helping to improve healthcare access