Network grows to 1,000 facilities to be the largest digital pharmacy network in Sub-Saharan Africa
Kisumu, Kenya, May 30, 2022 – Today is a big milestone for Maisha Meds as our network hits 1,000 facilities utilizing our technology across Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria and Zambia. Over 350,000 patients walked into one of our tech enabled pharmacies in the past 30 days alone (with 2.5 million in the last year), and of these 8,300 received clinically appropriate malaria, family planning, and HIV services through our health insurance-style loyalty program.
Maisha Meds is a health tech organization based in Kenya that works to improve access to quality care in the peri-urban and rural private sector through business management software and reimbursement programs for pharmacies, drug shops and clinics. The backbone of our offering is a point-of-sale pharmacy app to help our partners manage their businesses. Using the data from this digitally integrated network we design health interventions to support patients at the very bottom of the income pyramid, who typically buy what they can afford, not what they most need. In addition, we are also designing e-marketplace and credit solutions for pharmacies and clinics to help them access high quality medications at the best possible prices.
The POS app is an Android-based inventory management software that works in any clinic, pharmacy or drug shop, is free to download and was designed to support offline use especially in low-internet and on $100 android tablet computers. Our approach is intentionally light touch with value derived through the networking effect of bringing thousands of small independent facilities into a larger ecosystem, while respecting their individual incentives and business requirements. Through the Maisha Meds POS App, Maisha Meds is building the digital infrastructure for universal healthcare at the last mile.
We are deeply grateful to our funders for giving us the support to improve the lives of thousands, while helping small businesses and health providers run their businesses more efficiently and more profitably.
About Maisha Meds
Maisha Meds is an organization dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years have grown to support over 4 million patient encounters annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia with our suite of software products. We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with a focus on malaria case management (and results from a randomized controlled trial with the University of California, Berkeley due out later this year), injectable contraceptives, prenatal care, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, and COVID testing and vaccination.
Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with multilateral global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds. We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products. And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.
Our team is a mix of software engineers, operations experts, data scientists, and public health practitioners.
Contact:
Precious Kilimo, Strategy Lead