Merck Accelerator has announced the three startups that will join its programme in Nairobi this season.
The three aim to help solve healthcare problems by fighting drug counterfeiting with AI, using medical records to predict and detect diseases early, and using data management to improve global health supply chains.
One of the startups, Peach, is a cloud-based medical records system for hospitals and healthcare providers in developing countries which was initially developed during the Merck KGaA Health + Innovation Hackathon Accra.
Medical records are often hardly transportable to other places. Important patient medical records get lost easily, and can result in missing the detection or prediction of diseases. Peach, headed up by Cobby Amoah, Qwame Akpalu, Oteng Kwame Appiah Nti and Charles Kunene, are developing a cloud-based and scalable software platform to collect, store and access the healthcare information of patients.
Peach will help community health officers to find all the information they need to detect complications in time, anywhere, at any time.
The second startup to join the Merc Nairobi Accelerator is
RxAll, from New Haven, US. RxAll addresses the proliferation of counterfeit drugs which results in about 100 000 deaths in Africa every year as pharmacists often don’t have the means to test whether a medicine is fake or not.
The RxAll team, led by Adebayo Alonge, is developing an AI platform that aims to solve this problem. Pharmacies will be able to authenticate medicines through the platform, which uses deep learning to improve spectrometer readings in the field, providing real-time feedback about changes in drugs. In addition, the pharmacies can order the medicines directly through a digital procurement platform from the manufacturers.
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The third startup is Secure Data Kit (SDK), a data platform that helps global health providers relieve suffering.
SDK is led by Atlanta based Jared Malan and is focused on making data collection, data storage, and data sharing simple. SDK enables donor programs to capture disparate datasources and manage the complexity of a global supply chain. Donors are able to view the effectiveness of their programs in realtime through customizable metrics, reports, and workflow diagrams. Secure Data Kit is used by leading Global Health organizations and pharmaceutical companies.
