SMART RENDERS SMART INSURANCE

What has been the major impact of your organization particularly in the East African region?

Smart Applications International Ltd is a leading secure ICT services provider. Our flagship product is the Medismart Automated Medical Scheme Management solution using biometrically controlled smart card technology.

Our Medismart solution is in use at over 4,000 healthcare facilities across East Africa. Over the last 10 years, we have transformed the management of medical insurance covers by automating ease of access, eliminating fraud, automating rules on medical cover and digitizing healthcare claims between these healthcare facilities and the insurance companies thus achieving sustainability of medical programs as well as easy fast and secure access across the board.

On the wake of COVID-19 crisis, to what

Extent

would you attribute the need for digital transformation within the sector you serve?

Smart primarily serves the healthcare sector and indeed, there has never been a time than digitization has been required than now during the Covid 19 pandemic. The crisis has placed significant strains in the healthcare systems globally. This has called for automation and digital transformation to maximize the few resources to reach the expansive population in need. This has fostered the adoption of telehealth services such as telemedicine, which has also catered to ensure the upholding of social distancing while seeking medical services.

What is the more compelling case and demand for the solutions you offer?

As Smart Applications, we seek to inspire continuously a world of convenience. We have therefore launched the Smart One Time Pin as an additional and alternative level of security and convenience in access to medical services by our members for the present low contact society we find ourselves in, thus ensuring that the member will still be able to access conveniently healthcare services in a fast and secure manner. Secondly, we have digitized and achieved paperless e-claims between the hospitals and the insurers thus automating the process whilst providing analytics that have enabled both parties to achieve data driven decision making for their respective value chains.

Since your collaboration began with Gertrude’s Children’s Hospital, what value addition have you accorded the renowned healthcare service provider?

Intelligence in a day, the hospital has embraced a journey that it is now heavily dependent upon to make decisions through analytics of the gathered data.

To this effect, the hospital has onboarded analytics tools to minimize the gap between the data and the clinicians. “We are able to create and use dashboards easily that allow the hospital to interact with the data in a meaningful way,” said Kanda noting that it is now possible to filter different conditions, age groups, gender, locations or any other demographic in order to group them logically and recommend specialist services to a homogenous group of patients.

According to Kanda, it is now also possible to track patients going through long-term treatment to ensure that they adhere to their scheduled care as this improves outcomes. Asked what the end-result in this initiative, Kanda said: “Our target is to graduate to machine learning on the data sets that we currently have and through machine learning improve our patient care.”

In overall digitalizing healthcare is a key enabler to provide high value care. As a hospital, we are constantly in the process of improving our services to ensure good clinical outcomes Kanda averred observing that using ICT helps to expand precision medicine, transform care delivery and to improve the patient experience. “This is the only next level even as we prepare today for the next normal,” he concluded.

We are grateful for the partnership that we have with Gertrude’s. We have collaborated in various initiatives including contributing towards Gertrude’s needy children with heart conditions as well as on the technology front, have not only integrated to Gertrude’s core ERP but have facilitated a fully-fledged analytics platform for data driven decision making. This has enabled Gertrude’s to be agile in its business, offering the appropriate and tailor-made patient experience, operational interventions and even expansion based on data analytics, both prescriptive and predictive thus giving the hospital a lead in the market. We are also working with

Considering your reach with it various IT solutions and offerings, to what extent is your vibrancy in other sectors within the East African region?

As a secure ICT services provider, we are constantly innovating to deliver relevant solutions starting with our area of expertise, which is on biometrics, workflow automation and analytics. To this end, we have pioneered various solutions in the market such as biometric customer & staff identification, employee time and attendance/access control solutions, hospital management systems, bespoke mobile applications, automated SMS and survey solutions amongst others to both public and private institutions. Our guiding principle has been to create a smarter society through excellent technology solutions, and we are glad to be making this difference with our partners such as Gertrude’s Children Hospital and many other hospitals, insurances and corporates across varied sectors.