Health Innovations Fellow
Looking for something different? Maisha Meds is hiring! We’re looking for a creative, experienced, and motivated health innovations fellow to advance health care in East Africa, where over 60% of patients visit private pharmacies as their first point to access health care. Candidates will help us identify new approaches to maximizing our impact and develop small-scale experiments to evaluate these approaches and integrate patient care improvements into the app. These include using a combination of proprietary data on medicine quality, the quantity and strength of the medicine being prescribed, and available knowledge on the optimal use of medication to suggest improvements in chemists’ workflow and prescribing behavior. In addition, we are in the process of launching a patient-focused SMS service, and you will work with our partner organizations to design the text and workflows for this product.
You will leverage data-driven approaches, including analytics from the system and A/B testing to evaluate how different designs of these nudges lead to differential behavior change across the network. The work will also require extensive user-testing and market research to understand how pharmacies in our network interact with the technology.
About Maisha Meds
We’re working to make quality medicines and diagnostics affordable and accessible for the 2.5 billion patients worldwide who access primary health care at their local drug shop. Not long ago, we started with software that tracked medication sales and inventory at these drug shops and clinics. Now we are moving into medication supply chains, partnering with suppliers to ensure that effective medicines are stocked in pharmacies across East Africa, and that they have the working capital to optimize their shops. Our software is used by hundreds of pharmacies in Africa to support hundreds of thousands of patients each year.
For the people who use our software, it represents a way of tracking business decisions and accessing deals and working capital. For patients, we help strengthen supply chains and ensure that the medicine that they buy will be affordable and consistently high quality, in a setting where 1 in 10 products is counterfeit or substandard.
Job Responsibilities:
- Leverage best-practice for design: Conduct literature review to identify optimal strategies for providing advice and information that leads to health behavior change at both the pharmacy and the patient level
- Use data to develop systems: Work with product and marketing teams to conduct extensive user testing and market research, build personas, and identify a variety of strategies for integrating information and advice at salient points in the sales process. Work with product team to wireframe features and build or acquire databases with relevant information
- Lead A/B testing of behavioral health nudges for evidence-based care: Design and carry out pilot studies using our network of pharmacies that provide salient health prompts regarding best-practice for medication prescribing and quality
- Evaluate impact and cost-effectiveness of approaches: Evaluate the potential for health impact for different approaches and the cost associated with implementation.
- Report on findings and roll into core offering: For any approaches that seem to add significant value with a straightforward and cost-effective approach, roll into core operations and work with team to ensure implementation and integration in product.
Qualifications:
- Previous success driving results in an early-stage organization
- Experience with modeling, A/B testing, or health care delivery
- Interest in working with a diverse and multi-disciplinary team
- Effective communicator and extremely strong written and spoken English
- Strong problem solving skills including decision-making and time management
- Entrepreneurial nature, creativity, resourcefulness, and a sense of humor
- Previous experience in developing contexts preferred
- Excellent organizational and analytical skills with strong technical abilities
- Advanced knowledge of Excel and R
Why you should come work for us
Our company takes the best of Silicon Valley, including the technical expertise, rapid iteration, and agile processes, and applies this approach to solving problems that affect millions across sub-Saharan Africa. Though we can’t offer you catered daily meals, a Ping-Pong table, or 30” monitors, we can offer an opportunity to drive real, quantifiable change, help lead a small but passionate tech team, and give you access to some of the world’s most incredible places. We are dedicated to our work, and care deeply about our product’s impact, the clients and patients who use our software, and the company’s success. You’ll get the opportunity to help grow a small startup from a local operation, to a company serving tens of millions of people. On top of all of this, you’ll have the chance to explore this incredible region – spend weekends in tropical paradise, chase after lions and elephants, or climb some of the tallest freestanding mountains in the world.
Contract Details
Working at a startup in East Africa is a big decision, and we get that. As such, we’re offering a variable term contract, so you can decide how long you’d like to work with us. That said, we require a 6-month minimum commitment, and suggest staying at least a year. Your offer will include a return flight to/from Nairobi if you are based elsewhere, as well as regional travel to spend time with our team in Kisumu.
How to apply
Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@maishameds.org with the subject line “Health Innovations Fellow Application.”