Helium Health, a Nigerian health IT business, has acquired Meddy, a Qatar-based and UAE-based doctor booking platform. When Helium Health CEO Adegoke Olubusi made the acquisition, he affirmed how great the deal was because it spanned Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
Two executives from Meddy will join Helium’s leadership team as part of the deal: CEO Haris Aghadi, and COO Abed Alkarim Khattab. Moving forward they will become key players in Helium’s GCC strategy and operations.
Expansion of Helium Health by acquiring Meddy
In 2016, Olubisi, Dimeji Sofowora, and Tito Ovia launched a company noted for its electronic medical records (EMR) and hospital management systems in Africa. Its platform now includes HeliumPay, a billing and payments solution; HeliumCredit, a collateral-free loan product; HeliumDoc, a patient-provider and revenue cycle management tool; and data analytics services.
Helium Health has contracted over 500 healthcare facilities in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, Kenya, and Uganda. These hospitals now treat over 300,000 patients every month with over 7,000 medical experts. The majority of the time, an enterprise client requires a variety of services on a single platform, ranging from electronic medical records and management information systems to revenue cycle management, integrated analytics, and telemedicine.
Most GCC systems have vertical rather than horizontal use cases. The online appointment scheduling and teleconsultation services of Vezeeta and Okadoc enable users schedule appointments and order drugs; Bayzat provides an online platform for HR administration, payroll management, and health insurance; and Clinicy operates a digital healthcare management system, among other things. To get a holistic EMR experience, enterprise clients must stack these products on top of each other.
While SF-based Helium Health has many B2B solutions, it lacks in consumer-facing goods like telemedicine and appointment scheduling. The corporation could have constructed these services in-house, but acquiring Meddy was a better option. Meddy offers marketing tools for hospitals to boost their online presence and attract new customers, in addition to a doctor booking platform and telemedicine product.
Y Combinator and Tencent-backed Helium Health may now provide a wider range of services to health organisations thanks to Meddy. Under the name Helium Doc, Meddy will be merged with Helium Health’s patient-provider and revenue cycle management platform. With Meddy, Y Combinator and Tencent-backed Helium Health can now cover more services. Helium Doc will be the new moniker for Meddy’s patient-provider and revenue cycle management platform.
Aghadi says that the partnership enables its clients interoperability, something other EMRs and isolated individual platforms lack.
There are many legacy and new products that do not have open APIs, making it difficult for data to be transferred between them. As a result, providers are forced to make uninformed health judgments, resulting in lost revenue. In Aghadi’s opinion, “interoperability is a huge concern in the region, and having a one-stop shop like ours solves that problem.”
One clear reason for this acquisition and cooperation was exploiting what other healthcare platforms lack and taking advantage of an opportunity in the GCC region.
Both founders claim that Helium Health and Meddy have identical operations, technology, culture, and market pricing. Due to these commonalities, both companies signed the transaction in less than four months. Olubisi emphasised that beyond the actual product and market potential, what made the merger possible was the team makeup, how well they executed and the fact that the DNA and culture they share is extremely comparable.
Meddy now has over 150 private clients in the UAE and Qatar. With only $1.8 million in VC capital, the firm has helped healthcare providers bill over $130 million. Olubusi said the next step is to better serve the GCC market with its entire EMR solutions while also offering telemedicine and doctor booking services to African clients.
