Healthforce is a South African-based tech company, pioneering telemedicine and revolutionising healthcare in the country. They achieve this through enabling multidisciplinary clinical teams. In essence, Healthforce allows you to experience a doctor’s care at a nurse-run clinic and, through their web-based application, enables nurses to improve their clinical care with the support of remote general practitioners that support them and their patients.
The Origin Story:
Saul Kornik thinks far ahead. While the average John Doe sits at his desk and thinks about lunch, Saul is thinking about ways to make healthcare more accessible and affordable over the next 10 years.
He is able to synthesise seemingly disparate pieces of data into one picture, explaining their interconnectedness as if he is simply reading a chapter out of a beloved storybook.
Saul’s drive in co-founding Healthforce stemmed from the time he was running an NGO in South Africa that recruited doctors from around the world to work in rural hospitals in Africa.
During his tenure, the NGO successfully deployed more than 4,200 doctors, positively impacting the lives of over 34 million people. It was during this period that Saul recognised the potential of telemedicine systems, realising that the future of scalable healthcare hinged on solutions that were both operationally and financially feasible.
The Healthforce clinic model is entirely B2B, operating in preexisting clinics and pharmacies. Saul and his incredible team have proved that doctors and nurses can work together efficiently and significantly lower the cost of care.
“When we started Healthforce in 2018, we started with the customer, so the first team members we needed to bring on were user experience (UX) designers because we were determined to build for the customer.” says Saul
The current state of Healthcare in SA?
Currently, more than 80%+ of South Africans can’t afford private health care for the simple reason that it is too expensive.
Why is it so expensive?
“Well, when you go to the doctor you essentially pay the doctor to see you and not to make you healthy.” explains Saul.
This is not necessarily the doctor’s fault but it does create duplication of effort where multiple doctors or health care providers are independently conducting similar tests, procedures or consultations for a patient. This redundancy occurs because patient medical history is not shared among doctors, a practice incentivised to protect revenue streams. Consequently, new doctors often end up repeating tests that have already been conducted by previous practitioners.
This drives healthcare costs up and despite these high costs, healthcare outcomes in South Africa leave much to be desired because of the way in which fragmentation is occurring.
Fragmentation in the healthcare system refers to the division and lack of coordination among various healthcare services and providers. It means that healthcare services are not well-integrated, leading to inefficiencies, disjointed care, and suboptimal outcomes for patients. Fragmentation can occur at different levels within the healthcare system.
For example, pregnant women who are looked after by an obstetrician are still seeing a 80% cesarean rate where complications and risk are extremely high for both mother and child.
“The private sector is expensive and in accordance with the statistic above, 60% of the time you’re getting worse health outcomes. That’s the strange thing about healthcare, the more you pay the less you get.” says Saul.
Saul goes even further to explain that the problem stems from the systemic way in which the healthcare system has been incentivized and organised.
It puts the doctors and the funders whole pay them at the centre, instead of the patient.
The Healthforce difference:
That’s where Healthforce comes in.
“For the first time in a primary care environment, doctors and nurses can truly work together. We want to bring healthcare as close to the patient as possible and diagnose illness and disease quicker.” says Saul.
“We want to bridge gaps and create teams,” says Saul. With Healthforce, a patient’s information can be captured and shared between clinics and online consultation with a doctor is available here and then. This lowers the cost of care drastically.
“We’ve found that 80% of the time nurses can more than adequately tend to the patient’s needs and only 20% of the time is a doctor needed for an average of 4 minutes 30 seconds,” explains Saul.
By implementing best practice protocols and allowing the patient to rate the nurses and doctors and vice versa, Healthforce is improving the healthcare experience.
*Enter Platform45*
When speaking to the FinancialMail earlier this year, Saul stated that the best investment he’s ever made was finding the best possible product and UX designers and starting with them, even before onboarding software developers or engineers.
“We needed teams aligned with our entrepreneurial mindset to build the Healthforce vision,” Saul elaborates, “We spoke to a lot of people, but Platform45 was the best culture fit for us.”
The stroke of genius comes in that the Healthforce team uses pre-existing, underutilised infrastructure to deliver on this goal.
There are over 3 000 pharmacies across the country and alongside Platform45, Healthforce created tech that can facilitate early stage healthcare consultation at your local pharmacy.
Our Head of Engineering, Frank, wrote the first line of code for Healthforce and 5 years later we are proud that we are on this journey of transformation with such indelible and forward-thinking partners.
Healthforce is just the start for Saul and the Healthforce superhero team, providing a low-cost entry point into the healthcare system.
“Building on this foundation,” Saul explains, “We can, in time, enhance the scope of our care delivery by integrating additional elements, like enabling access to specialists and establishing seamless referral pathways into hospitals.”
In 2022, the vision evolved even further with the launch of Kena — a groundbreaking direct-to-patient telemedicine and health engagement service accessible via smartphones.
Kena recently won the MTN Business App of the Year Awards 2023 as well as winning the Best Health Solution App for 2023!
This innovative platform empowers healthcare workers to provide comprehensive care, from treating patients remotely to guiding them to appropriate clinics and ensuring continuous support at home, outside the traditional clinical setting. But this is a remarkable story for another day that we look forward to sharing soon.
Timeline and accomplishments:
- In 2018, Healthforce launched its platform that allows nurse-led clinics to connect to remote doctors through video calls.
- In 2020, Dis-Chem invested in Healthforce, allowing Healthforce to expand its footprint across Dis-Chem nurse-led clinics. Catapulting Healthforce to the largest telemedicine provider on the continent.
- As of 2023, Healthforce-enabled clinics have delivered over 4 million nurse-led consultations in over 550 clinic rooms with an average of 75 NPS, well above the industry patient experience scores.
Onwards and upwards! 💪
