Ponea Health: Consolidating the Entire Global Health Ecosystem Into One Easy to Use Platform

Interview with Akshay Shah, Co-Founder of Ponea Health

Is going to Google, as well as medicine websites and forums, the right approach when people have a health issue? What are your thoughts on that?

Self medication or trying to be the Google doctor is dangerous, because you really do not know whether the source of information that you find on Google is actually validated. Is it authentic? Is it coming from a credible clinical professional? You can get everything from the most quack theories to the most credible thing. How does one know where to get the right credible information and the guidance? Then, once you have understood what the right steps you need to take are, how do you know that you are actually going to get that care at the right price, from the right clinically qualified person, and at the right time? Google does not solve that problem. If anything, Google creates more confusion and could possibly lead people down the wrong path.

Health is very expensive in some countries. What do you have to say on that?

We are solving a global problem because healthcare as a system globally is broken in so many ways. Most of the time, patients get treated to fix the symptom. You are always in a sick care mode, never in a preventive care, proactive care mode. And that is something that fundamentally has to change. People need to be able to be much more proactive and preventive with their healthcare, because it is a lot easier to be healthy than to get sick and become healthy again. That is one thing that we are solving by really providing a lot of awareness, education and self-assessment, so that people can become much more proactive with their healthcare.

How do you do that?

If you have all of your health data with you and that health data is being converted into trends, alerts, targets and reminders, essentially, if we gamify your health using your own health data, you are now actually treating your health as if it is a game that you are playing. Every time patients go to a doctor, their health data gets updated around their own personal medical records. Today, most people do not have their own medical records with them. They have medical records, but they are sitting with all the different doctors, pharmacies, labs, and radiology. I wish I had all of my medical records since the day I was born till today in one place. And then all of that information being converted into a way in which I can understand it, because then I know that what I am doing today is affecting my health tomorrow. I might be suffering today from something I did 10 years ago. It is about creating an awareness of your own personal health through your data, and then using that information to really give you small nudges, reminders, awareness, education, because being healthy is about having a habit, having a certain lifestyle and having a lot of awareness, and not to get confused by all this noise which is out there. Some of it is propagated by food and beverage marketing. And some of it is just wrong information.

We enable people to become much more proactive with their healthcare through consolidation and gamification of personal medical records. But then we also make it easy by providing a medical operation center where if somebody is not sure what they need to do, we give them the right guidance. The Ponea Medical Operation Center helps patients do that. We do not do the treatment, but they can call the Ponea Medical Operation Center, talk to somebody who is a clinical qualified person and get guidance based on the symptoms they are describing. We can help you book the right specialist in your area. Or we might even have a specialist who is willing to come to your home and provide you treatment in case you have mobility issues and you cannot travel. So it is really about getting that personal guidance so that when I am making a choice, I am making it with a lot of confidence. I am not just flying in the dark.

Is it free to call?

Yes.

If people decide that the right solution is to see a specialist then the cost comes along, right?

Exactly. The way we structure the whole platform is by connecting three important actors in the healthcare ecosystem globally. First, is the patients who need access to a marketplace to know what is available, at what price and in what location. Is it available through telemedicine? Is it available through home care or do I have to go there? They should be able to see the reviews of other patients and they should see a clinical rating of this provider. All of that transparency comes through the marketplace which we have as a website, as well as a mobile app. For example, you could be living in a country where the cost of care is very high, but there could be a more affordable option in another place that is just across the border. And you could just simply go there and, for example, get an insulin injection at a fraction of the cost compared to the country in which you are living, and for some people that is a life and death choice. So the marketplace really enables that to happen. It gives the power of choice back to the patient.

On the other side of the platform, we have the healthcare professionals. Here, we are talking about nutrition, wellness, and outpatient care. And later, we will also get to inpatient as well. Those healthcare professionals include doctors, pharmacies, specialists, labs, radiology, etc. As individuals or companies, there is no way to have an AI doctor. For instance, you cannot have a digital pill, those things are physical things that have to be provided. Yet, when you think about where healthcare is today, it has not yet transitioned to the same technology that happened to airlines 30 years ago. At the time, if you wanted to fly somewhere, you would have to physically go to a travel agent or to the airline office to purchase a ticket, then go to the airport to receive your boarding pass and your seat allocation. That whole thing was based on what the airline was giving you, and you as a traveler did not have the power of choice. Today, imagine an airline not being on a travel marketplace like Expedia. If you are an airline and you are not on Expedia, you are going to be out of business. We believe that that same transformation in healthcare is also happening. If you are a healthcare professional and you are not connected to a marketplace, you will eventually be out of business because the patient is the one who has the power of choice. And if they cannot find you on a marketplace where they cannot see your reviews, your price, and an easy way to connect with you and book an appointment, then you as a healthcare provider are essentially going to become obsolete. There is a need to plug in to a health tech platform, which is what we offer through Ponea.

Then, we have the third piece of this whole healthcare ecosystem puzzle which is the partners, because we are trying to solve this whole thing in one go. They can be healthcare professionals like insurance companies, financial institutions which are providing a loan or savings product around healthcare, donor institutions or philanthropic institutions who are trying to channel funding to the most vulnerable populations in the world, employers, etc. Basically, we look at all of these different partners who can definitely help to make the healthcare system and the patient outcome much better. For them, the biggest challenge is how do we plug in, how do we access the healthcare professionals and the patients? How do we streamline that experience for them and make it friction free? How do we put money into the Ponea Health wallet and make sure it is only used according to what the insurance will cover or what the employer will cover and so on? Through the Ponea Health wallet, the partners can integrate and then enable the patient and the professional to transact.

So there are three parts on the platform: the patient, the professional and the partner. In the center, we have the medical operations center, the patient medical record to consolidate the data, and the Ponea Health wallet. And that in a nutshell is what Ponea Health is all about, to solve the global problems of healthcare and make it easy to be healthy.

Tell us about your competitive environment and how you distinguish yourself.

There is definitely a lot of tech transformation happening in healthcare. And there are many companies that are getting involved. A vast majority is trying to fix a specific problem. There is a number of tech enabled doctor booking platforms, but that is all they do. They have a catalog of doctors on their website or their app, they help you book an appointment with the doctor, and that is the end of it. If after that there needs to be some sort of follow up, or the patient medical record, or the chronic disease treatment, these things are not being addressed.

There are a lot of platforms that provide tele-health, telemedicine, or online doctor consultation. Again, they are solving a specific part of the problem, but not everything, because if you have a backache, or you have some swelling, or you have difficulty swallowing, something that needs a physical examination, it is not going to happen over Zoom. There are many situations where a tele consultation will not work. That does not mean tele consultation does not work, but it only works for certain situations.

Then, there are other tech enabled platforms that are providing online pharmacy, ordering and delivery. That is a fairly straightforward model. You can upload your prescription and the pharmacy will basically deliver it to you or you can pick it up. But not all of them are connecting to our marketplace, which again means that it is a pharmacy that has the fixed prices, and they are essentially making it a convenience, but not the transparency. In the sense that you do not have to physically go to a pharmacy anymore, you can order it from your app, but do you know if you are getting the right price? What we do in Ponea is we get pharmacies to bid for your prescription, and whoever is going to provide the lowest price is going to get the order, and then they can deliver or you pick it up.

There are a lot of different tech enabled healthcare companies. But remember that if they are only treating a part of the problem, then they are also only having a part of the patient data. And that means you as a patient are not getting the benefit of all your health information being in one place so that you can move from sick care to a proactive prevent care.

How do you address the fear that the population now has of data being given away to other tech companies?

The first thing is to understand what the intentions of Ponea Health are. Because we are not running this as a charity, we are not being funded by a government. We are a private for profit technology enabled company. Our mission is to make it easy to be healthy, and that is for life. We are looking at the lifetime value of our user or patient on the Ponea platform. And if we were to compromise the trust of our patients, they would leave the platform. We are a patient centric platform, and we expect that the data of the patient belongs to the patient. We digitally consolidate all of that data and give it to the patient. And when the patient makes a booking with any doctor, lab or specialist, that is when the patient’s data becomes available to that healthcare professional. If the patients want to get a second opinion, they should not have to go to their first doctor and ask for their records. They should have the freedom of choice to do whatever they want with their data. And if the patient wants to leave our platform, they take their data with them. We are not controlling the patient’s data. The patient is controlling their data. If we want to keep the patient for life as a part of Ponea, we have to essentially use that data to help the patient.

What are the advantages of investing in Ponea?

The first reason to invest in Ponea is if you want to transform the healthcare system globally, and just make it easy for everyone on this planet to be able to be healthy and be proactive with their healthcare. Investors need to believe and want to participate in that mission. Of course, investors are not coming in and giving a free ride. They want to see a return on their investment. There are very few platforms that are having the ability to consolidate the entire health ecosystem into one easy to use platform, for the patients, the healthcare professionals and the partners. And ultimately, when you think about where to go for a certain activity, like travel, you do not go to five different apps to book your ticket. You go to one app and you sort out your travel. So why shouldn’t that happen in healthcare? That is another reason why investors should be thinking about investing in one ecosystem that allows other people to plug in. Ponea is an open platform that is entirely built on partner integration, making it easy for the patient and the professional. And that is the reason why people will make Ponea Health a one stop shop.

Another reason, obviously, is going to come to the financial defense ability. For instance, is this going to be something that is going to make high revenues in good times and low revenues in bad times? How is it going to operate? Right now, the world is going through stagflation, there are fears of recession happening next year. Bitcoin has crashed by more than 60%. It is a very volatile situation. There is a crisis going on in Europe between Russia and Ukraine. In that environment, healthcare is one of the sectors that is going to be financially defensible. People are not going to stop caring about their health. It is important to invest in areas which are resilient, no matter what is going on in the world. And there are plenty of problems around healthcare. The developed world has different problems from the developing world, but being able to achieve a level of transparency and convenience is a universal problem that everybody is going to understand and want that problem to be solved. That is another reason why investors should be looking at Ponea Health. We are fixing our global problem. We are not fixing a problem for emerging markets or places which are yet to develop in healthcare. We know that there is a global need for transparency and convenience around healthcare. So this is a globally applicable solution. It can work in any country. And it can be globally scaled and create millions of jobs, which is another good reason to invest in Ponea.

Besides, in developing countries, there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. But what we have found is that the healthcare professionals are actually spending a significant percentage of their time doing administrative things because they are the whole chairman to doorman of their business. They are the ones who are doing the administrative work of calendar booking, appointment reminder, invoice payment, record keeping, etc. Ponea takes that work over, which then gives that healthcare professional more time. And then we fill up that time by giving them more patients. And that in itself enables people who have invested several years of their life to get qualified as a pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor, a specialist, a radiologist, or a lab technician, to put their talent to work and be able to serve patients more efficiently.

How are they going to invest?

Ponea is a tech startup and we are in the very early stages of our growth. We have built the first version of our tech and we have started generating some revenues. We have over 12,000 patients on our platform, as well as 300 healthcare professionals, and we are growing on a daily basis, but these numbers are very small in the context of the global mission that we are solving. We know that because we are at an early stage, the type of investors that would be coming in are going to come in essentially because they believe in the idea, our ability to execute on that idea and the business model. But at the same time there is risk. Because we are a startup, we do not have the hundreds of thousands or millions of patients yet, but we are going to get there. So far, the investors have put in more than $4 million into Ponea, and they have all been angel investors. These are high net worth individuals who believe in what we are doing and who have the confidence to back us up. Our next stage will be to talk to venture capital firms, foundations who are specifically looking at supporting healthcare, and corporate investors who are also in the healthcare space. That is the next level of investors that we will be targeting. Because by then they will be able to see that we have achieved a certain level of product market fit. We have achieved that product market fit in Kenya. Now, it is all about how we further the scale, not only in Kenya, but in other countries around the world.

Right now, we have a small round at a lower valuation which is a million dollar, and that is available on first preference to our existing investors. And if there is some room available on that, then we would allocate some of that to new investors. But the next round is a $4 million race. We expect that to be opened up by the middle of next month and that will be at a slightly higher valuation, still a very competitive entry point compared to other tech platforms in the world because of the stage at which we are at. At that point, there will be a lot more room for investors to come in and participate in the 4 million round, and essentially this combination of this 1 million and 4 million gives us enough capacity to be able to take the technology to the next level, and also to be able to enter into some more countries, acquire more patients and really start being able to demonstrate our ability to scale from achieving product market fit in one market to now going into multiple areas.

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