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Michael Macharia, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer at Ponea Health, the online healthcare marketplace made in Kenya, explains the birth of the Ponea Health concept.

“A set of circumstances enabled the Ponea concept to come together sometime in 2020. Once, I was leaving my house early in the morning, dropping my son at school, and I was not feeling too well. So my driver said I should go see a doctor. I was looking at my busy schedule and was just feeling fatigued. So I figured I should just call my doctor. I did but he was not available, so I sent him a message describing the way I was feeling. He responded within minutes and proceeded to tell me to do some tests. He sent me a prescription with the lab test to do and told me he knew a lab that could come to my office. By the time I dropped my son at school and got to the office, the lab technician was waiting for me to collect blood samples. He came with a lab collection form, took my blood, and I paid him and my doctor using M-Pesa, which is a mobile payment platform. Then I continued doing my work as usual and four hours later, my doctor was able to call me back to discuss the results. He gave me my treatment regime and sent me the drug prescription. I sent it to a pharmacy I knew and they were able to dispatch the medicine using an Uber motorcycle delivery service. Three weeks later, something similar happened. I was driving my son to school and he was not feeling well, so I had to do the whole process again. But in my son鈥檚 case, it was urgent. I had a meeting in the office, so we did a tele-consult with the doctor and the same procedure happened again. Lab tests were done, his medicine was delivered, and I dispatched him home. In comparison, that would have taken me a whole morning to go to the hospital and wait in line to try and get a booking. That鈥檚 when I realized that everything was in place. The providers in the ecosystem were in place and the FinTech platforms were in place. What was required was a technology driven platform to put everything together, connect the doctors, labs, patient records and payment platforms. I suddenly realized the reason people didn鈥檛 seek healthcare was because it was complicated. But what if healthcare was made easy?”, says Michael Macharia.

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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