Hospitals often struggle finding blood donors.
There are often pleas from families and friends asking for blood supplies but it is usually a hard task. However in Nigeria the biggest challenge is usually being able to get safe supplies of blood and getting it delivered in the right condition. Temie Giwa-Tubosun who is the founder and CEO of LifeBank has managed to get safe blood supplies delivered to those who need it most using the power of technology.
So what is the company about?
LifeBank helps hospitals discover blood and other essential medical supplies and help deliver to the hospital in the right condition. They deploy mobile and web technology, smart logistics, and Artificial Intelligence to build an end to end marketplace and cold chain logistics. Temi’s mission is to save 1 million lives in 10 years. Temi’s passion begun when she noted that biggest cause of maternal mortality in the continent and the developing world is something called Post-Partum Hemorrhage. Basically, women give birth and shortly after, they start bleeding. However, if the hospital does not have blood to transfuse to these women, they go into shock and they die. In Nigeria where Temi was born, it killed over 26,000 young women every year. As a mother myself she had a difficult delivery and was lucky enough to have access to a good health system in US.
After this, she decided to move back home to Nigeria and help solve this problem.
After she went back home Temi knew that she needed to have conversations with experts in this sector. She spent close to a year, taking meetings, having discussions, and learning as much as she could. Through this, she realized that the problem was much larger than she thought, it affects women of course, but also children under 5 who have malaria, accident victims, cancer patients, kidney dialysis patients, people in car accidents, the problem was so vast that 1 in 3 people entering hospitals will need blood. Also, it wasn’t just blood shortage but also lack of communication to know who has the blood type you need, and lack of infrastructure to move the blood to where it is needed on time and in the right condition. This led her to build LifeBank.
The obvious reason she created this digital health startup was to make a difference. People will never stop needing blood, it’s not a need it’s a matter of survival and that’s where LifeBank comes in.