Afrigather Adeola Ayoola is the founding father of Famasi Africa, a digital well being platform that helps folks handle and entry their medicines, schedule doorstep deliveries, in addition to automate month-to-month refills.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered in the midst of operations?
The most important problem is that there’s no current expertise to construct on. Beginning a digital pharmacy requires stringing a number of instruments into one and attempting to make them perform in a means they weren’t designed to. For this reason we began to construct our personal in-house infrastructure for us and others to construct on. In the end, by aggregating every little thing required to energy digital well being on one platform, our objective is to energy 1 million refills straight and not directly by 2027.
How do you counter the issue of self-medication? Do you solely present remedy when sufferers current an official prescription; or anybody can get entry to medication?
Self-medication is a large menace in healthcare globally and it goes past self-prescribing to self-dosing, self-therapy, remedy misuse, poor adherence, and illicit use of managed substances. In Nigeria, the prevalence is between 60–90%. One of many issues my co-founder and I did after we began was to seek out out remedy tendencies and patterns. We requested a ton of questions, certainly one of such being conversations with a Bolt driver. A serious determinant for self-medication is the comfort and accessibility of medicines to self-medicate.
At Famasi, we don’t prescribe medicines, and we solely work with prescriptions or straight with suppliers. Nonetheless, we prioritise comfort, entry and personalised assist for our prospects. Through a dashboard, they’ll order, observe and refill their medicines with a devoted assist channel to offer info on the right use & advantages of the medicines.
As we develop, we intention to proceed to seek out easy methods to speak well being info and warnings to our prospects.
What ought to we count on from Famasi Africa within the subsequent 5 years?
Our intention is to energy 1 million refills throughout 5 African nations within the subsequent 5 years, together with nations in East and West Africa. By our roadmap, our APIs must be embedded in fintech and uper apps, permitting folks to entry same-day remedy supply, remedy insurance coverage and personalised care providers by way of their wearables & a cell app.
What are some issues you realize now about working a healthtech that you just want you knew earlier than you began Famasi Africa?
Lack of infrastructure. One of many main causes healthtech is difficult to construct is the absence of infrastructure to layer the improvements on. This additionally contributes to why healthtech options are inbuilt silos and fragmentation is obvious.
If we had identified how a lot hole exists on account of lack of infrastructure, we’d have solved for it first. Nonetheless, by constructing a digital pharmacy first, we learnt rapidly the wants of our prospects and we’re higher geared up to ship on them. At present, we’re constructing the infrastructure to energy last-mile take care of Famasi and different digital well being improvements to be constructed.
Founders speak about how arduous it’s to get expertise. Has this been a problem for you up to now?
We’ve had our fair proportion of expertise challenges, nevertheless it’s not a lot in getting the abilities as it’s discovering the best expertise who align with the objectives and tempo. At Famasi, we wish individuals who can do the work but in addition contribute positively to the tradition; on the core of what we do is a deep connection to the issues we’re fixing for Africans.
We just lately spotlighted Adeola Ayoola in our thrilling new video collection, My Startup in 60 Seconds. You may watch her episode here and different movies within the collection here.
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