Ponea Health: A Global 3-Sided Marketplace Connecting Patients, Healthcare Professionals and Partners

Interview with Michael Macharia, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at Ponea Health

What is the history of Ponea?

A set of circumstances enabled the Ponea concept to come together. Once, I was leaving my house early in the morning, dropping my son at school, and I was not feeling too well. So my driver said I should go see a doctor. I was looking at my busy schedule and was just feeling fatigued. So I figured I should just call my doctor. I did but he was not available, so I sent him a message describing the way I was feeling. He responded within minutes and proceeded to tell me to do some tests. He sent me a prescription with the lab test to do and told me he knew a lab that could come to my office. By the time I dropped my son at school and got to the office, the lab technician was waiting for me to collect blood samples. He came with a lab collection form, took my blood, and I paid him and my doctor using M-Pesa, which is a mobile payment platform. Then I continued doing my work as usual and four hours later, my doctor was able to call me back to discuss the results. He gave me my treatment regime and sent me the drug prescription. I sent it to a pharmacy I knew and they were able to dispatch the medicine using an Uber motorcycle delivery service.

Three weeks later, something similar happened. I was driving my son to school and he was not feeling well, so I had to do the whole process again. But in my son’s case, it was urgent. I had a meeting in the office, so we did a tele-consult with the doctor and the same procedure happened again. Lab tests were done, his medicine was delivered, and I dispatched him home. In comparison, that would have taken me a whole morning to go to the hospital and wait in line to try and get a booking.

That’s when I realized that everything was in place. The providers in the ecosystem were in place and the FinTech platforms were in place. What was required was a technology driven platform to put everything together, connect the doctors, labs, patient records and payment platforms. I suddenly realized the reason people didn’t seek healthcare was because it was complicated. But what if healthcare was made easy?

Then I figured out that hotels give you the same experience, whether you are in a one-star hotel or five-star hotel, the commitment to the service they give you is generally clear. I want a bed, I want a good room. I want a gym. I want a good restaurant. Why can’t the same experience in hotels be translated into healthcare? Why can’t the patient be at the center of engagement of their own healthcare? Why can’t they really decide to have access to their own medical records, make sure they can make decision based on convenience, efficiency and price comparison? I figured out this was what the market needed and so we went out to the market immediately.

I met with doctors, specialists, labs, pharmacies and hospitals, and I found out multiple things, such as differences in patients’ care, variation in prices for the same treatment or lab test, etc. It made me realize we had to build a price discovery platform for people to be able to understand price points, and make it easy for them to understand healthcare. That was really where we started. We knew the payments’ ecosystem was quite mature, as with mobile money people can make payment on debit and credit cards. There is also PayPal that can be used. Besides, we found out that a significant amount of people from the diaspora made payments on behalf of their relatives. The amount of diaspora capital coming to the market is in billions. Between 15% and 25% of that money comes to fund healthcare.

I also realized there were price variations in healthcare. For example, at one facility a lab test would go for $10, while at another facility it would go for $45. I tried to figure out what the rationale was. Why should the same service be more expensive? There is a perception that the more expensive it is, the better it is. There is no correlation between good care and price, it is about outputs and outcomes. So I asked myself: why don’t we just build a price discovery platform so that people are able to understand price points for healthcare, and make it easy to understand healthcare?

We found that there was also a need to build a concierge platform to drive concierge services, just like the travel industry. You have airlines, hotels and car hire companies. They are different but at one point they all come together. So today you go to eDreams or you go to lastminute.com and you can buy a ticket from Emirates or British Airways directly from those sites. You can book a hotel, a cab, a flight without even having to deal with a travel agent. So it has forced the travel agents to evolve and become 360° travel partners. And that is what we are trying to do. We want to be the 360° healthcare partner.

What was the journey from the original idea to the implementation of the platform?

The first thing was to figure out how to build a business of this nature. We went around the world, identified and looked at which countries we could domicile in terms of scalability. But how do you build a business that is scalable from day one, and can be reused in any other continent? The technology is the first thing you have to determine.

The next thing you need to look at is the kind of partners needed in this ecosystem, while at the same time keeping patients at the center of the whole engagement. We started working on the tech and then COVID happened so the idea was to build an asset like platform to start serving COVID patients directly from home. The first thing we did was to identify providers that were offering COVID tests. Then we had to identify where COVID patients would come from. We began building a customer engagement platform whereby we used WhatsApp, Google chat, Facebook and Twitter chat to try and bring everything together. We then built a medical operations center. Once you build a medical operations center, you have identified the partners you are going to work with. So we started looking for labs. We went out there and identified the labs that were offering COVID tests. We teamed up with them. We negotiated pricing that was appropriate for the patients and after one year, even less, most people knew the price of a COVID test. So medical was no longer a complex thing, it became simplified and commoditized. When people tested positive, they sometimes needed home recovery services, pharmaceutical products and bedrest. Some people would want to stay at home and they would be looking for mechanized beds. So again, onboarding players that could deliver that kind of service on our platform was important. We were renting hospital beds and sending them to people’s homes. Most of those partners are very poor at marketing and putting their products out there. You could be looking for a hospital bed or an oxygen concentrator, not knowing where exactly to get this product from. A lot of information was not available to patients for them to make certain decisions. How do you even know where to get a medical bed? You Google it, you cannot find it, but yet there are providers in the market who have these services.

We also found out that the communication between that whole ecosystem is highly built on the premise that referral will work. Doctors will refer you to a place where you can get an X-ray, an MRI or a bed. So doctors become the reference point for products in the whole ecosystem. We then brought in pharmaceutical people, infrastructure providers, ambulances, hospitals with inpatient care, labs, imaging centers, specialists that could do video consultation, etc. As you are doing all this, you are building a marketplace. You are building a technology platform that can be used by doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, psychologists, labs, pharmacies, hospitals, etc. In a way, you are becoming the Uber Eats of healthcare.

We then also had to deal with the issue of patient ID, information and data discretion, because we are aggregated. Technically, we do not seek patient’s information. The information is exchanged between the doctor, the lab and the patient, without having to come to us. Our platform is able to trigger that the service was delivered by a lab without having us see the lab results. That is how we are able to bring all the players together. And that is what we call the Ponea marketplace. At this point, we have more than 400 providers and over 20,000 patients.

What kind of impact have you already seen?

Across the ecosystem, the first thing that has come to the table is the conversation about value for money by providers. Because even as a service provider, you can log into Ponea and realize you are expensive. And you start questioning why you are expensive. So, automatically, we have seen a lot of providers lower their prices after coming to Ponea and seeing the transparency.

The next thing we have seen is that the providers really care about their quality assurance rating and what patients are saying about them, something that was not as transparent before.

We also realized that, whichever channel patients come from, whether they come from a mobile app, the web, or WhatsApp, they are very lazy. They do not move from the channel that they find easiest for them to stay on. So you need to let them stay on the platform that makes it easy for them to get healthcare. Whether it is a voice call, a call center call, or a WhatsApp call, patients want an easy way to access your platform. So you cannot push your patients to download your apps because you can. We need to keep patients where they feel most comfortable.

Besides, patients want to control their destiny. They want to know their records and go around with their records. They want to feel that they have control. That is something that we established.

Lastly, we found out that patients were ready to look at financing options for some of their healthcare interventions, such as dental or optical. They can now do dentures or braces over a period of 12 months for the same amount. Patients were willing to go through that journey so long as the payment options were provided.

We continue to learn every day, but one thing is for sure, if you simplify healthcare, patients will understand it and they will consume it.

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