In many parts of Africa, healthcare is still restricted to the four walls of hospitals. This has resulted in hospitals being overcrowded and overwhelmed. Another cause of this is the lack of medical facilities and professionals. Regardless, Teheca, a Ugandan health startup is contributing its own quota to resolve this problem. How is Teheca doing this? Well, Innovation Village caught with the CEO and co-founder of Teheca, Daniel Ruyonga. He told us about Teheca, their participation in the Google Launchpad and their future plans. Excerpts
Can you briefly tell us about yourself?
I am Daniel Ruyonga, the C.E.O and CTO at Teheca and also a co-founder. We Founded Teheca back in 2015 with my co-founder and CFO Namugambe Asha. I’m passionate about entrepreneurship with a focus on health entrepreneurship and technology specifically in Android and web.
What’s Teheca all about? How has it helped Uganda?
Teheca is a patient care startup that rose out of the need to provide easy and timely health care access to Ugandans. At the core, Teheca helps families and individuals search, find and request for a qualified patient care assistant to care for sick loved ones and new mothers.
In Uganda, we have helped new mothers recover quickly after childbirth by providing them with skilled care assistants who help nurse them back to health and be able to raise healthier babies and stronger mothers. For the patient care services, we have greatly helped families overcome the challenges involved with caring for patients
What can you say is the motivation for setting up Teheca?
Making healthcare more accessible and available outside the health centres and hospitals. Its no secret the health care systems in most African countries are broken, overcrowded wards, understaffed hospitals and in some places lack the facilities. We believe by providing people with a way to access health services directly, timely and easily, it will greatly improve the livelihood of people.
We also believe that we need to retain our qualified healthcare workers within our health care systems by providing them with an alternative source of employment opportunities and making them more accessible to the community.
Trust is very important when it comes to taking care of clients family members and loved ones, how have you been able to guaranty trust so far?
Teheca patient care assistants go through a thorough vetting process from qualifications that they must have to continuous training and up skill session that they have to undergo before being enrolled onto our platform. We recruit registered nurses who must possess the certificate from the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council which regulates the Nursing and Midwifery professionals in the country.
What are some of the challenges of running your startup in Uganda?
Like any Technology startup, there are challenges of adoption and retention of users.
limited trust in Technology by the community. Patient care services are relatively a new concept so there is still slow adoption. Of course, funding to allow the company get off the ground. People management especially for us dealing with management of health workers.
Your startup has just been named among the 12 startups to participate in the Google Launchpad Accelerator, how do you feel about this? What are you looking forward to?
This is exciting and at the same humbling. It means a great load for our startup to be validated by Google. We are greatly looking forward to downloading a whole lot of information from the vast experience of the mentors at Launchpad so as to help us improve our services and develop better products for our current and future clients.
Do you think Ugandans have embraced the idea of sourcing caregivers online since the arrival of Teheca?
They are warming up to the idea. We believe its just a matter of time, all the people reaching us via phone calls and office visit will soon be using our online platform and app to source for the caregivers, this is mainly because of the ease of use, the ability to have as much information about the care provider before the request and more features that we plan to improve or add after the Launchpad period.
What future plans do you have for your startup?
After fully understanding and serving our Uganda Market, Teheca shall move to Nairobi first and then the rest of East African capitals. Our mission is to be able to improve accessibility to health care for our people before we can scale further outside East Africa.
What advise do you have for young and aspiring entrepreneurs?
Its probably been said before, but start now is the best advise, of course, all the odds are against you but at least you can do research on that one thing you would like to do. If we hadn’t started we wouldn’t have been selected for the Google LaunchPad.
