LifeBank — Hacking Health
A year ago, we officially launched LifeBank. 4 months later, we went to market with our first product, a blood discovery and delivery app for Hospitals. It has been an incredible year of tough lessons for our young team, great recognition of our work, but above all, we have saved people’s lives.
LifeBank is a health technology company focused on connecting hospitals with the blood they need across Sub-Saharan Africa. We built an app that allows us to list all the blood available in a community and where it is located. We deploy this information to our hospital clients and deliver blood, platelets, and plasma across Lagos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In nine (9) months we moved 1,968 pints of blood and blood products to 65 hospitals. We have provided discovery and delivery services to public hospitals like LUTH and private hospitals like Reddington Hospital. We have moved products worth a little over N4,000,000. We earn revenue on each service we provide and are committed to our financial and impactful bottomline. We have also helped over 300 ordinary Nigerians give blood, and saved up to 900 lives in the process.
I started this work because of a simple conviction, that Africans deserve access to good health care. I believe that health care is both a fundamental basic need and that it is an inalienable human right. The lack of which, leads to senseless deaths of the most vulnerable people on our continent, especially mothers and their children. Motherhood and the process of birth should be happy and death free for the mother and her child. I believed this before I became a mother, I believed it even more when I almost died whilst giving birth to my baby, and it became my life’s work when we lost my sister (in law) to it. I also know that great companies should have dual bottom lines and that there is no need for a dichotomy between making profit and delivering impact that lasts.
In the last year we have learnt so much, we have met amazing Technologists like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State. We have had the chance to share LifeBank’s story with CNN, NewsWeek Europe, Channels Television, TEDxEuston and many others.
We have also been lucky with the caliber of advisors, investors, and supporters we’ve had. We have amazing people like Biola Alabi of Biola Alabi Media, Barbara Bush of Global Health Corps, Dr. Muyiwa Gbadegesin of the Oyo State Government, and the awesome team at the Co-Creation Hub, who have believed in LifeBank from day 1 and really put up their resources and helped propel us to this awesome stage of growth. We are also grateful for David Oamen, who invested his hard earned money into LifeBank in a contracting economy, this only shows commitment and a staunch confidence in what we are building. We have been so fortunate.
We have also had a few challenges, the biggest of which is the struggle to do on demand delivery during emergencies. We believe that it is in the best interest of patients for us to remove the emergency nature of getting medical products and we are exploring ways in which we can use data and technology to solve this.
Our pints moved continues to grow quarterly. We continue to add new hospitals and we make enough money to cover operations and more. We have gained important insights about our market, our customers, and our operations that will propel us to our growth phase so we can do more for patients, blood banks, and hospitals. Over the next 2 years, we will move 100,000 products to 2,000 hospitals and save 100,000 lives. We are also building a movement of a million Nigerians ready and willing to give blood to save lives.
Our big goal is to use technology, smart logistics, and big data to deliver a seamless health supply chain system for health care workers across Africa. We believe that physicians and other medical workforce should focus on delivering care to patients and not spend a significant chunk of their time chasing after the products they need. We believe that technology and big data can bring innovation into this process and really save millions of lives.
We are thrilled about our journey and we invite you to join us.
