11 minute read
How reach52 bridges the gap in access to healthcare using tech
Through tech, reach52 aims to connect with more partners for better services
The unique startup aims to connect to 250 million individuals across the globe by 2030.
Founder and CEO Edward Booty is driven by his years in healthcare and tech consulting From the data collected, reach52 organizes activities and holds events that will cater to specific communities’ to reach far-flung communities in developing countries. Bringing reach52 to life was not an easy feat and powering through the past year became more of a challenge to grow amidst the trials brought about by the pandemic. As the company reaches out to more individuals to promote health care, they also aim to connect with more private, public and nonprofit partners to improve the services that they offer.
Speaking with Healthcare Asia, Booty said that their services are made possible with the help of technology. Using offline apps that don’t require the internet, reach52 trains agents and government workers in more rural and non-urban areas to collect information on what type of needs must be given attention to in their partner communities. needs, such as screening, public health events and access to doctors. These are delivered in the communities themselves, coordinated by the network of agents. The name “reach52” came from a World Bank and World Health Organization statistic in 2018 which showed that 52% of the world had lacked access to essential healthcare. With years of experience in India and experience in digital health consulting in the UK, Booty started reach52 five years ago in Singapore to hopefully bridge this gap. Funded mainly by the private sector and partnering with pharmaceutical companies, reach52 says it can provide medicines, insurance and consumer health products at a lower cost - alongside the primary health services. Some examples are medicine for
Tech allows hepatitis which are offered at $5 healthcare instead of $30, and maternal health services to scans for $9 which usually costs reach more about $20. On top of this, the travel private, public can be about three to five hours to and nonprofit drive to the city hospitals, so the partners services are both more convenient, affordable, and save on the time and cost of travel. “We collect the data and have these people in the communities coordinate the health services, then the private sector will provide capital whilst the government provides human resources. High quality medicine and other essential health products and services are delivered in the community through better trained health workers. ” he said. “We do make a small margin on those medicines that we deliver and that’s how we’re keeping our service sustainable, but we also bring health care to the communities and save people money for their health care
access costs, which is a key part of our mission to enable health for all,”.
Booty said that whilst this is the ideal scenario for all the communities they reach out to, there are a couple of challenges that they currently face such as country regulations and laws.
However, on top of that is the overall lack of digital maturity in health systems especially in developing countries.
“The digital maturity of the health systems would be one of our biggest barriers but I’d break that down more. There is really unhelpful or prohibitive regulation in many countries. For example, prescriptions still have to be on paper and not digitized, or telehealth and virtual consults are not allowed. Insurance paperwork has to be physically signed. A lot of these regulations do block us, or just create inefficiencies and more cost in a segment where affordability is key” he said.
“Secondly, on the digital maturity of the users, not all have smartphones and often there’s no internet. This means there is a need for high amounts of training and effort to actually embed these systems into place. Offline working is just painful, software development is more expensive and harder. Then we have to sync the phones periodically which causes all sorts of operational issues, The lack of payments infrastructure and thus cash also adds to costs and risk” he added.
‘reach52 for business’
According to Booty, reach52 is a mix of B2B and B2C financing. They earn from small delivery fees on the medicines and on insurance plans that they deliver.
Additionally, B2B partnerships are essential for sustainable financing that will help them continue servicing emerging markets and more rural, non-urban areas; as well as enabling getting access to more affordable products.These partnerships included screening, health awareness campaigns, health worker education, and other relevant services that strengthen primary healthcare.
“We actively work with the private sector to do market research, helping them understand the gaps in the markets for their product, run screening campaigns, run health worker education in certain disease areas, raise awareness of certain health issues, but then also really look to get affordable products from them and open up a new market for social business. Then, we actively promote and sell them, again, noting regulation around health care marketing.” he said.
“We really span that whole spectrum of going from the research to strategy, running the services at communitylevel, engaging in the health workers, and then give access to products and services at the end of that as well, managing the ordering, payments and supply chain. That’s really what we do with our business partners, we give that end-to-end service,” he added.
Working with different groups in both private and public spheres, they’re enabling sustainable health system services and last-mile access to products in markets where others don’t reach, so there aren’t direct competitors.
However, the undiagnosed are the biggest threat. “I do always say that our biggest competitor in that space is people doing nothing because about two thirds of diseases are undiagnosed in Asia. People just don’t know they have diabetes, they don’t know they have hypertension, because they’ve never been able to find that out” he said.
“We’re always working with these patients to really understand what they do have and help them to understand why it’s important. They might buy medicine from us, or the alternative or the competitor, but the alternative to that is them just not knowing they have hepatitis and getting liver cancer because they’ve done nothing, or having their child die at birth from an avoidable complication we could spot with a simple scan” he added.
Connecting to 250 million by 2030
Booty said that reach52 is scaling by targeting to be present in more countries within the next decade.
After a successful launch in India over the past year amidst the pandemic, new ways for them to connect with more communities have opened.
“The way that we’re doing that is very much working with partners on the ground. With NGOs, which we have tried in India given the COVID restrictions that were put on us, worked really well. We paid NGOs to help us recruit the field force and recruit these health workers that use our tech and enable access to health care and rural areas,” he said.
“It’s really efficient. NGOs get another revenue channel and we get quicker growth, leveraging that sort of trust network and ability to recruit and train people in regions. Ultimately, it is faster growth for us and is more affordable. We save money by doing it that way versus just going to all communities alone,” he added.
Currently present in three markets, particularly Philippines, Cambodia, and India, reach52 is set to expand this year beyond Asia and into Africa. They have just hired the first team members in Indonesia and Kenya.
“We’re doing okay in three markets. Now, we are launching in Indonesia and we’re also launching in Kenya later in the year and starting to look to build out our presence in Africa,” he said. “Expanding our B2B relationships is also key, but its a slow game as its quite a fundamental rethink of entrenched business and commercial models for our partners, albeit the global sentiment, in my view, is shifting towards impact, sustainability and profit with purpose.”
“We are looking to be in five markets by the end of the year and connect 250 million people to health care by 2030,” he concluded. “COVID-19 has shone the light on how weak yet essential health systems are, and we’re going to do something about it. Watch this space.”
The lack of digital maturity in health systems is a big barrier to healthcare access
The reach52 promise: affordable and accessible healthcare for all
Alexandra Hospital bags Healthcare Asia Awards for Patient Care Initiative of the Year - Singapore
Its Care Consolidation programme reduces the patient’s need to transfer to various healthcare institutions for their appointments.
also don’t get frustrated from getting asked the same questions by different doctors.
Apart from the benefi ts mentioned in earlier sections, Care Consolidation reduces the patient load at the outpatient clinics as each principal doctor manages multiple conditions for each patient. This means more clinic slots were available for patients who need them and waiting time for appointments could potentially reduce.
Dr Neeta Kesu Belani (Project Lead), Mylene Virtudazo Malinao (Nurse Manager), Golda Wang (Senior Pharmacist), Jessica Tan (Senior Occupational Therapist), Malcolm Koh (Medical Social Worker)
Caring for a population of 1.1 million across 26 precincts in the Western region of Singapore has always been the driving force that motivates Alexandra Hospital (AH). AH, which has been under the National University Health System (NUHS) since 2018, serves as a 326-bedderfacility that provides seamless, one-stop comprehensive care by one care team to some 100,000 residents in Queenstown precinct (the oldest housing estate) and Southwest and the rest of Singapore.
Intending to redesign healthcare with and for humanity, AH brings seamless integrated carebeyond discharge and enables continuity of care anchored in the safety and comfort of the home and community. Driven to redesign healthcare with and for humanity, it also aims to develop technologically-enabled, innovative healthcare as well as personcentric solutions that enable best practices to be scoped, shared and scaled.
AH’s patients are predominantly elderly and with multiple co-morbidities. Many patients have appointments at different institutions. This leads to care fragmentation, frustrations in navigating the system(s), duplicative tests, unnecessary costs and inconvenience for patients and their caregivers. Care needs to become holistic again and re-centred around the patient and caregiver.
This led AH to be the fi rst integrated general hospital in Singapore that provides holistic and seamless care from acute, sub-acute to rehabilitative settings. Through its Care Consolidation programme, the patient’s need to transfer from one healthcare institution to the next is signifi cantly reduced.
To start the project, the hospital’s team decided to start to consolidate the outpatient appointments of inpatients at AH. To create a user-centric process that integrates the needs of the care team, patients and caregivers, the project team adopted a Design Thinking Approach.
The team also aimed to create impact and deliver value as early as possible. They adopted Scrum, an Agile framework whereby work was broken into Sprints or time-boxes of 2 to 4 weeks. Since Care Consolidation is a new concept in Singapore, the team also had to create a brand-new process from scratch. Their two objectives were to assign a principal doctor who works with other AH healthcare professionals as a care team to each AH patient and minimise their patients’ number of appointments.
Over a span of six months, the monthly percentage of AH inpatients that were care consolidated was between 13% and 26%.
The majority of patients who had their number of appointments reduced had one to three fewer appointments, across different institutions, on different days. After care consolidation, they are now seen at AH’s Integrated Care clinic.
The cost savings over a year for consultation fees alone equate to at least a few hundred dollars per patient on average. Time and costs incurred for travel and consultation are greatly reduced. Patients
Dr Neeta Kesu Belani, who has been leading care consolidation for more than two years now, credits the good effort to a multi-disciplinary and close-knitted team at AH who work in the hospital and in the community.
Through design processes such as fi eld research, role-playing and prototyping, the team has come up with solutions it hopes can help plug the gaps, especially amid Singapore’s changing social landscape.
“We were looking at how we might encourage patients to keep up with their appointments, how we can make it easier for them, which is how the one principal doctor concept came in,” Belani said.
“This involves building rapport with the patient, so that the patient doesn’t need to repeat the story to a different doctor each time. One care team who had known the patient as an in-patient when admitted and then followed the patient up as an outpatient, also makes for a safer and better experience for the patient. With one stop care, the patient can get to multiple health points here, but with only one trip here to AH,” she added.
As the fi rst in Singapore to adopt agile principles and methodologies in redesigning a care process, Care Consolidation is a concept that makes a patient’s health journey much more manageable for the patient and the caregiver. AH hopes to inspire other hospitals and healthcare institutions to shift to a more patient-centric paradigm in care planning and delivery care.
