R/GA Innovation Exchange Spotlight: Meet Nicole Kayode of Medixus
As part of our Inclusive Innovation series, we interviewed the female founders who participated in our 2019 R/GA Innovation Academy with Kinship at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We spoke with Nicole Kayode of Medixus about using communication as a tool for innovation in healthcare.
As patients, we have certain expectations for our doctors. We trust them with our lives, our friends, and our families. Yet healthcare knowledge available to doctors varies around the world, which ultimately affects the level of care we as patients have access to.
Nicole Kayode, Co-Founder of Medixus, a knowledge-sharing platform for African doctors to connect and discuss challenging patient cases via a secure online app, knows first hand how proximity allows for better or worse patient care.
“The quality of care you get is based on where you live. If you are in America, you probably will get a better quality of care in New York City than you would in rural Arkansas,” Nicole explains.
“The idea from Medixus came about from a personal experience of losing someone in the Nigeria healthcare system in a scenario where it was pretty preventable. I looked into the issues a bit more and realized that one of the big things was a communication issue, that the doctor didn’t have somebody he could turn to and ask when he wasn’t sure. Initially, your response is, how can he not know? How can he not know the answer? As a result, in trying to do his best, ultimately, a loved one suffered from low-quality care and ended up passing away. The genesis of this idea was partly frustration, partly sadness, and feeling like this isn’t something that should happen. It feels like there’s a pretty simple solution contributing to it happening less.”
Medixus was founded on the belief that open communication is key to driving change. With an MSci in Biomedical Science and Organic Chemistry and several years working in the UK health sector, Nicole saw the importance of knowledge sharing in the medical community and together with her Co-founder, she embarked on a movement to create an app robust enough to unite the world’s medical community.
“Being able to access quality healthcare is a fundamental human right. It’s the underpinning of economic development for a lot of countries. We’ve seen it, for example in Rwanda, they’ve made massive improvements in better access to healthcare and made strides in achieving Universal Health Care (UHC) which had translated into economic gains. A sick population isn’t a working population. It’s important at many levels, both a macro level in terms of how a country does economically and just on a more human level. I don’t think it’s right that anybody should have to be subjected to no healthcare or low quality of healthcare by virtue of where they live or their proximity to a big city. It’s a global problem.”
To date, Medixus serves as a local tool for African doctors to take advantage of.
“It’s not about connecting African doctors with Western doctors because I don’t believe that’s the answer. It’s about connecting African doctors with other African doctors who understand the local realities and treatment pathways — that is where the power lies.”
Available as a mobile app and on desktop, doctors can upload images or supporting files along with a description of the case for other doctors to interact with. Doctors then get notified if there’s a case in their specialty; encouraging them to interact with the doctor who uploaded.
“It’s really just the simple power of communication. That’s what it’s all about. It can empower people to make better clinical decisions that directly benefit the patients that come into their care. Once you know that a certain symptom indicates a certain condition, you have that knowledge for life. Every single patient you see will benefit from the fact that you now know that.”
As more information gets added to Medixus’s platform, more life saving medical solutions can impact the African medical community at large — and eventually the global medical community.
“What we hope to eventually see is a living breathing repository of medical knowledge that is contextualized to the local African market, so it follows local treatment pathways, local disease burdens, and eventually, you don’t have to Google things. You can search Medixus and its asked and answered.”
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This year, R/GA Ventures partnered with Kinship, the newly launched ventures, technology, and business innovation arm of Mars Petcare, rebranding the program the R/GA Innovation Exchange with Kinship. The R/GA Innovation Exchange program extended its marketing and advertising focus to tech startups in the growing sphere of purpose-driven companies that can create positive change on a global or local scale.
To learn more and stay in the know, visit ventures.rga.com/studios or follow @rgaventures on Twitter.
