Ponea Health: Helping Patients Become More Proactive and Preventive with their Healthcare

Akshay Shah, Co-Founder of Ponea Health, discusses how the Ponea platform is helping patients become more proactive and preventive with their healthcare.

“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”, says Akshay Shah.

“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. 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”, he adds.

ABOUT PONEA HEALTH: Ponea provides an online healthcare marketplace that offers convenience, discretion and lower cost of healthcare to africans living in urban areas. Ponea targets to consolidate 70% of private healthcare providers online to provide greater choice and access for patients, and more cost-efficient operations for providers from the marketplace enablers. Ponea enables expansion of private healthcare through enhanced distribution of medical services thus creating jobs and driving full employment of the scarce medical providers.

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