CASE STUDY
MedTrucks: smart mapping comes to the aid of medical deserts By Proparco’s Communication and Marketing Department
Between Morocco and France, the CEO of MedTrucks, Anass El Hilal, has only one obsession: bringing healthcare services to vulnerable people. To achieve this, he uses data to map medical deserts and optimize the deployment of e-health services within them. The start-up has just raised EUR 2m to scale up its solution.
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nass El Hilal, 33, has been developing innovative solutions in the health sector for almost a decade. In 2015, this biomedical engineer who graduated from Polytech Montpellier set up MedTrucks with two partners, Jamir Derrouiche and his sister Asmae El Hilal. Their objective: tackle the problem of medical deserts in Morocco using new technologies. The start-up is based in Casablanca at the social impact incubator Bidaya (Sprint network). It rapidly developed its solution which aims to supply Moroccan health players with medical trucks coupled with a mapping tool. MedTrucks, which was awarded the 2016 Orange Social Entrepreneur Prize, has developed a pilot mobile dialysis project for sick people in rural areas to make their daily lives easier. To increase the efficiency of its mobile medical unit service, it has combined it with a tool to map the health sector in Morocco. “By comparing a number of indicators and processing both geographical and statistical data, our solution identifies the need for access to
healthcare of people, detects areas where there is a shortage of medical provision and thereby optimizes the organization of the rounds of our medical trucks”, says Anass El Hilal. He adds: “Back in 2016, using the data we managed to collect from regional health centers, we were pioneers in health mapping. There was no similar tool in Morocco, or even in France for that matter.” While the concept of mobile mini health centers proved a big success in Morocco’s rural areas, MedTrucks was unable to raise sufficient financing to deploy its solution on a larger scale. There was still too much resistance to innovation. In 2018, MedTrucks decided to put its trucks back in the garage, along with its Moroccan ambitions. But Anass El Hilal, who was in the Top 30 of the American magazine Forbes that year for “French-speaking personalities who shape Africa’s future”, had learned his lesson: the digital maturity of people and territories remains an essential condition to ensure the success of an innovation. And there was still limited interest in data up until a few years ago, in Morocco as elsewhere.
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