Nigerian startup myclinic.ng is focused on solving the problem of healthcare access in Nigeria by working closely with hospitals to enable them to extend their healthcare services to inaccessible locations using telemedicine.
Since launching about two years ago, they have evolved as a team, and this evolution can be credited to the enormous lessons learned on their journey to enterprise development.
The company was initially formed on the basic conviction that access to healthcare should not be costly or unnecessarily stressful. On the back of this, they set out to build telemedicine infrastructure to enable individuals and families to remotely access high-quality medical care from the comfort of their homes via mobile applications and toll-free mobile numbers. It is on these that they learnt several important lessons.
Firstly, despite the huge demand and need for remote medical consultation, it was still very difficult and expensive to market telemedicine as a standalone product, the cost of customer acquisition was simply too high considering the amount of traction required to break even.
This was taking into cognisance that due to their business model, they were performing two critical functions. The team served as technical enablers of telemedicine by developing and maintaining the mobile application and as service providers by employing & paying the doctors that deliver the online consultations. The unsustainable nature of this approach inspired their pivot to a hybrid Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and telemedicine company. With this, they have developed and integrated an EMR system into their telemedicine platform, and the hospitals that have adopted this EMR solution are able to use its telemedicine component to deliver remote medical care to their existing clients. This helps these hospitals streamline their operations to serve only as technical enablers of telemedicine without having to worry about employing doctors to deliver the service itself. They currently have seven hospitals running their integrated EMR.
In November 2020, MyClinic emerged as one of the eight Nigerian Companies that received funding of US$30,000 from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). This funding also came with selection into the Next Innovation With Japan accelerator, a business accelerator program organised by JICA in partnership with Ventures Platform Foundation. The funds have significantly helped in their pivot and to achieve significant milestones in product development.
With the aid of the funding raised, they have also significantly increased the technical depth of their team by hiring experienced developers. These individuals have further accelerated their rate of iteration and product development. The team’s short-term target is to increase the number of hospitals running their solution to a minimum of 32 before the end of the year. In the long term, their aim is to continue to expand the frontiers of access to healthcare, by empowering more healthcare facilities to reach even more patients with the power of telemedicine. MyClinic.ng also plans to expand to emerging markets like Kenya and Egypt before 2023. They are confident of not only meeting but exceeding this goal.
It’s inspiring to see more startups take an interest in providing accessible healthcare, and the dedication the team has shown to building has been nothing short of admirable. We’re excited to see MyClinic.ng hit all the goals with their revolutionary solution’s impact on Nigeria’s healthcare sector.
