Case study:
Elephant Healthcare
Elephant is a healthcare tech startup working with emerging economies across the globe. They provide key planning, tracking and inventory infrastructure to enable and support regional and national healthcare services.
Back in February 2020, there were the beginnings of reports of a new virus spreading across the globe. As Doubly Good were already working with Elephant Healthcare at that time, we knew how vulnerable people in emerging economies could be, and wanted to make some small contribution to the COVID response.
At that moment in time, little was known about the virus itself, and the key objective for any healthcare service was to monitor and track the progress of the disease. In advanced economies, it was fully expected to be built around always-on internet & GPS enabled smartphone saturated populations.
However, in Kenya & Ghana, we knew that this was not the characteristic use of phones. Internet access was a more scarce resource, smart-phones were not ubiquitous, and phones might often be shared amongst family members.
However, inspired by projects like M-PESAen.wikipedia.org, and OneAcreFundoneacrefund.org we knew that USSD was a much more prevalent and familiar tech.
Over the course of a weekend, we built a very simple proof-of-concept using USSD technology that could ask some key questions about symptoms.
USSD is a fairly old technology, used primarily for over-the-air calltime topups in the West. Typically, you ‘call’ a session, with a shortcode, like *147# and then the user and system can communicate with short messages and numeric responses.
We coupled this with a state-of-the-art Serverless deployment process that mean we were able to make changes very quickly across the entire system.
When we showed this to Elephant, they immediately diverted some of the company’s fantastic tech team to building out the system, to demonstrate to the Kenyan Ministry of Health.
Should have been an obvious success, right?
Well, not quite. The tech was fine, but one problem was that the symptoms of COVID at that time were hard to differentiate from other diseases. So, the questions were of limited usefulness. However, the Kenyan health ministry were interested to know if they could get some insight about COVID preparedness across the country, particularly in very isolated rural clinics.
So, along with Elephant, we refactored the questions for a clinic management user. Without any previous setup, we were able to ask all clinics about the stock levels of key materials such as PPE, masks, gloves and basic medication. We also created a summary dashboard that regional health administrators could access the information they needed in order to help clinics prepare for COVID.
By July, we’d launched the project, and had contacted thousands of clinics and health centres across Kenya. The results were enlightening. Facilities that were isolated by distance and technology suddenly had a voice and were able to communicate directly with the health ministry and get the assistance they needed.
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