We are delighted to announce the launch of a new reach52 medicine ordering and delivery service in the Philippines in partnership with Novartis Social Business, Zuellig Pharma and MedExpress. This service enables patients in rural Philippines to order a range of affordable medicines via reach52’s marketplace app and teams of community-based agents. The medicines are then delivered via reach52’s mobile-enabled logistics network directly into the patients’ villages, overcoming barriers of distance and affordability. The new service is powered by reach52’s health technology, which has previously won awards and recognition from the United Nations, Singtel, Facebook and Accenture.

In parallel with the launch of the digitally-enabled logistic solution for ordering and delivery, there is also a separate and independent team that continues to run health education and health camps for the rural populations.

Healthcare access and affordability remains a pressing challenge for many communities in the Philippines and across South East Asia. In the region, 62% of deaths are now due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which primary care systems are poorly positioned to address. Rural populations face challenges in accessing the medicines and services they need through traditional delivery and financing models.

The new service has been delivered through reach52 for business. This is our solution for private sector organisations (Pharmaceutical, MedTech and Diagnostics, and Insurance companies) to deliver their products and services at affordable prices to these previously inaccessible populations. We conduct analysis into communities’ needs, design pricing and access solutions, and deliver the affordable medicines and services through our mobile-enabled network. Community members are equipped as agents to run the marketplace and logistics sides of our operations.

As Ed Booty (reach52’s CEO) highlights “This is not just a stop gap solution. The combination of community empowerment, digital health and private-public partnership is establishing a truly sustainable model for communities, governments and private sector organisations.”

Deborah Gildea (Head of Novartis Social Business Asia) comments “Together with reach52 we pioneer new digital solutions to drive healthcare access in low- and middle-income countries in Asia. We are driven by the goal to deliver our portfolio of high, quality affordable medicines and health education programmes to hard-to-reach patient populations, building sustainable models through digital health and community-run services.”

Maarten Kelder (SVP Strategy & Corporate Development at Zuellig) adds “reach52 brings together digital health, data analytics and community empowerment to make healthcare more accessible for emerging markets in Asia. We are looking forward to working closely with them on programmes to provide affordable and quality healthcare to rural areas in the Philippines.”

We are delighted to announce that from November 2019, we are changing our name from Allied World Healthcare to reach52. The new name and identity are the start of a dynamic, next phase of global growth, driven by our purpose to make healthcare go further, so every community can thrive.

Over the past 3 years, we have partnered with governments, NGOs, and the private sector to deliver accessible, affordable healthcare in low- and middle-income communities where previously there was no healthcare at all. Our work has been powered by award-winning apps and platforms, innovative public-private partnerships, and equipping community members to run services for their communities. We are proud of the impact that has been achieved, connecting over fifty communities to primary healthcare services they couldn’t access before, delivering health outreach programmes and a range of other support. And these are not stop-gap solutions. Through working with the communities, governments and NGOs, as well as innovative businesses such as Novartis, Gilead, IQVIA, and Facebook, we are establishing fully sustainable health system models that benefit everyone.

But we also believe progress towards UHC and access to healthcare for all is too slow. Affordable health services still don’t reach 52% of people on the planet… that’s over 3 billion people. Lost lives and lost potential for communities, governments, business and the world. Digital health isn’t being adopted quickly enough. Costs are increasing. Simply enhancing existing healthcare systems doesn’t go far enough for the communities without essential healthcare services. As reach52, we’ll continue to pursue new and better ways to deliver affordable healthcare for the 52%. Inventing and implementing new digital health solutions for low- and middle-income countries, harnessing data to drive precision public health, and forging new partnerships to provide access to affordable medicines, diagnostics and health insurance that communities need.

‘Words can’t describe how far we have come in the past two years, more than I ever thought possible, and I am so proud of our team and partners for making this happen. However, we are just getting started. reach52 represents what we have become, and our ambition to build solutions that can connect 52% of the world to healthcare support. Systemic change is needed to achieve this, and that’s what we’re going to deliver’ says Ed Booty, reach52’s CEO and Founder.

Going forward, reach52 will be organised into reach52 and reach52 for business. reach52 empowers community members as Access Managers who use offline-first apps to provide health support and connect residents to the treatment they need. Through our data-driven insights into the needs of communities, we also work with governments and NGOs to shape targeted, effective healthcare strategies and programmes.

reach52 for Business is our social business arm, which works with private sector organisations (Pharmaeutical, MedTech, and Insurance companies) to deliver heath products and services at affordable prices to previously inaccessible communities. This is powered by our mobile-enabled marketplace and logistics network, and teams of community-based agents on the ground.

More than half of the people on Earth still don’t have full coverage of essential health services and almost 100 million people fall into extreme poverty from paying for healthcare. In South-East Asia, while some positive progress has been made in achieving universal health coverage (UHC), it isn’t happening fast enough.

In the region, 62% of deaths are now due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which primary care systems are poorly positioned to address. Traditional service delivery and financing models often fail to adequately serve residents of remote communities. Data indicates that rural populations of South-East Asia still face persistent challenges in accessing essential health services compared with their urban peers. To overcome these challenges and reach universal health coverage in the region, players in the healthcare system must fully embrace digital health technologies to move beyond experimentation and small-scale pilots.

Why digital health can expedite UHC progress in South-East Asia

Digital healthcare platforms offer tremendous advantages for resource-constrained health systems in rural and remote areas of low and middle-income countries in South-East Asia striving to achieve UHC 2030 and SDG targets. Digital health allows systems to take advantage of existing resources and infrastructure, providing more services directly in communities via telemedicine approaches and task-shifting strategies.

Digital technologies are also well suited for preventative approaches, including wide-scale screening or education campaigns. India’s ambitious national goal of screening every citizen under 30 using an mHealth (mobile health) device for risk factors related to leading NCDs is a prime example. Furthermore, by integrating digital health solutions, governments and the private sector have increased access to rich, quality data to accurately inform the allocation of scarce resources – and leapfrog the challenges of many developed health systems.

We recently spent time with our community-based teams in the Philippines and Cambodia, where we’re partnering with the government, healthcare providers and the private sector to deliver affordable healthcare in remote communities. These are regions characterized by tremendous challenges in last-mile delivery of essential health services. We know from our research that the barriers are not limited to out-of-pocket payments, but that the cost of travelling long distances to seek care, along with lost wages from missed work, can be equally debilitating.

Our approach involves empowering community members (a team of women in each village who we call access managers) to create individual health profiles of residents using proprietary offline-first apps. These access managers are then able to conduct tailored public health engagement and outreach campaigns, as well as ordering and delivering medicines and health services at affordable prices directly within the communities themselves. This enables local residents to overcome many of the traditional barriers to healthcare access, all while relying on support from a local peer to navigate the system. By merging mHealth solutions with an embedded community presence and last-mile delivery, we are able to create a holistic approach that overcomes some of the common limitations of telemedicine initiatives.

Under this innovative model, we recently engaged and onboarded 42,000 individual residents in two rural and remote municipalities in Western Visayas, Philippines. The resulting community health profile indicated that access to vitamin A supplementation was a serious challenge in these areas. Vitamin A supplementation is an evidence-based practice which reduces mortality and promotes proper development in infants and children. In response, we worked with the local government and NGO partners, to facilitate a programme to address this gap, using our detailed community data to identify the specific households that would benefit. As a result of these efforts, 1,221 infants aged 6-11 months old and 7,714 children aged 12-59 months were provided no-cost access to this vital intervention – 100% coverage.

These recent visits were a time to reflect on strategies to invigorate and enable faster adoption of digital health technologies, to address the persistent subnational health inequities which prevent many citizens from accessing essential services. What’s clear is that digital health is critical to hastening UHC progress in low and middle-income countries, but stakeholders need to work together to address some surmountable challenges.

How to overcome the barriers and achieve UHC faster

1. Driving system change vs fragmented solutions

While it’s fantastic to see digital health players address different unmet needs in healthcare systems, such as health worker training and mHealth applications, this can result in fragmented approaches which fail to create the systemic change needed to achieve UHC. Digitally enabled health systems are also dependent on telecom companies and the monopolistic nature of this industry in many markets creates an additional barrier.

Standardization is vital to scale and each sector must learn to adopt a common framework for technology development, allowing transferability across national boundaries. At Allied World Healthcare, we have adopted all global healthcare data standards, but the regulatory environment around areas such as e-prescriptions and telehealth means our solutions have added complexity. A recent review found that more than 150 countries have absolutely zero Health regulations, for example. A robust regulatory environment with global standards helps to promote, rather than inhibit innovation, fosters consumer trust and addresses legitimate concerns about data privacy and product safety.

2. Designing health apps for access anywhere

Internet penetration is now at 63% in South-East Asia, with 415 million people having internet access – up from 380 million a year ago. But rural communities are at risk of being left behind as internet access often ranges from poor to non-existent in these areas. Digital literacy amongst those with more healthcare needs, such as older people, is still lacking. In addition, accessing the internet is often expensive for those people living in rural and remote areas who might benefit most from digital health solutions.

This notion is supported by data from rural India which suggests strong links between mobile phone ownership and health care access. Among the findings, poorer rural households without mobile phones experienced more adverse health events. A more enabling and competitive market among telecom providers in rural areas would help to reduce monopolistic practices, promoting technology diffusion and reducing prices for consumers.

Our determination to connect the unconnectable means we have had to embrace offline working for novice tech users. This has led to peer-to-peer syncing of devices, simpler user interfaces and using video instead of text. For any major player in this space, designing solutions for the limitations of the last-mile is of paramount importance. The digital divide must not create new forms of health inequities.

3. Power through data-driven insight into communities’ needs

As Steve Jobs once said: “You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” Yet, too often digital health solutions are not fully utilized as there’s been insufficient focus on understanding the real needs of communities and healthcare professionals.

When looking at our community-level data, a village’s health needs can be vastly different from another right next door. For example, our profiling has uncovered instances where Village 1 has an extremely high prevalence of diabetes, which is broadly non-existent in Village 2 next door, where we see that kidney disease is rampant. Analysing relevant data and uncovering the right insights will drive much more targeted and effective health solutions for local communities.

It’s time to embrace digital health fully

Governments and other stakeholders in South-East Asia have a tremendous opportunity to embrace digital health and leapfrog the long-standing barriers to UHC that exist in previous service delivery models. Government spending on digital health produces an outsized return on investment, providing a clear incentive for investment in such solutions. The private sector is already leading the way with scalable, innovative approaches and disruptive technologies that are poised to change the way that healthcare is delivered in the region. What is now required is full support, cooperation and investment from the public sector. This will fully unlock digital health’s potential as the driving force behind the region achieving its UHC 2030 goals.

Allied World Healthcare is pleased to announce that our core platform, Curis, is now live! Curis is a brand-new and bespoke digital healthcare platform for emerging markets; addressing the many of the challenges faced in low-connectivity, disconnected and offline environments.

AWH has built and tested the system; engaging with a vast number of partner organisations and broader users to ensure the system meets core requirements and is intuitive and usable in real-world scenarios.

At its core, Curis delivers:

This market-leading platform has been designed specifically for the limitations of the communities in which AWH works – notably low bandwidth internet, lower rates of digital literacy, and the need for low operational costs.

The platform is now being configured for the Philippines, with roll outs planned through 2018 and beyond.

Edward Booty, CEO of AWH, said: “This is a huge step in our development, and we would like to thank NUS and our broader partners for their fantastic effort, support and funding for this project”.

Tamsin Greulich-Smith, Chief of NUS’s Smart Health Leadership Centre, said “working with Allied World Healthcare to develop the software platform that will facilitate access to healthcare services for remote communities has provided tremendous experiential learning for our Master of Technology Software Engineering students. Furthermore, this research and development opportunity has allowed our students to appreciate the impact their technical skills can potentially have on people’s lives. Using technology for good makes everyone feel good!”

On World Hepatitis Day, Ed Booty shares new ways to transform hepatitis screening, diagnosis and treatment based on our work in LMIC communities…

During a recent visit to our sites with our community teams and healthcare service providers, we explored the challenge of viral hepatitis and what’s getting in the way. Progress on this disease globally is still slow, with a 2019 WHO report calling for a major scale-up in testing and treatment access to achieve its 2030 targets. 9/10 people still live unknowingly with this disease, and low- and middle-income countries account for the largest proportion – 96% of people living with HBV and 72% of those with HCV2.

Misinformation and stigma remain a key barrier. In communities it is shocking to hear the anguish and confusion of normal, decent people who simple can’t fathom how they came to have a disease they associate with drug use or unprotected sex. Adequate screening and diagnostics simply don’t reach these communities – many of the essential machines are expensive and in private facilities, often in urban areas. The chronic nature of Hepatitis B poses financing challenges for health budgets already strained from investment in infrastructure and initiatives to end infectious diseases on the global agenda (such as malaria, TB and AIDS). In 2017, only 58% of the 82 WHO-reported low-and middle-income countries had included domestic funding in their national hepatitis plans.

Robust vaccination programmes should solve the problem eventually and those born today and in future years that are vaccinated will contribute to a declining prevalence rate. But new solutions are also needed now to combat hepatitis, and public-private partnership is essential to solve this challenge. For World Hepatitis Day, I’ve shared 3 ways that we can achieve this in practice based on insights and learnings from our community solutions and programmes.

1-Overcome misinformation to find the missing millions

The World Hepatitis Alliance advocacy campaign focuses on ‘finding the missing millions’ living unknowingly with viral hepatitis. Overcoming misinformation is critical to finding these missing millions.

I am open to admitting that, as a non-clinical professional, I initially got the causes of hepatitis wrong. From our work within communities and with community health workers it becomes apparent that I am not the only one.

This misinformation, creating stigma and isolation in communities, must be tackled directly through awareness campaigns that drive better understanding of the causes, diagnosis and treatment pathways. The campaigns must firstly address emotional barriers to change entrenched attitudes around hepatitis and motivate people to get tested.

For example, at reach52 we have been working on targeted, door-to-door screening campaigns. Based on our initial community health profiling, we can conduct discrete interactions in the home, directly with a community member, with robust content to help them understand what a specific condition means. This has allowed our non-clinical Access Managers to provide better support, access healthcare and extend the reach of government health providers.

2-Make screening and diagnostics go further through technology and people

Screening programmes are woefully inadequate. Infrastructure is lacking and many of the tests required for safe diagnosis according to recommended clinical protocols (such as viral load testing – also used for HIV/AIDS) are missing in lower-income communities. Diagnostic equipment often isn’t available in public rural health facilities, adding additional burden to lower-income residents. Treatment is often expensive, but regardless of the price, it just isn’t available in more rural communities – the pharmacies don’t have stock. To address these healthcare system gaps, we believe it’s essential to both harness new technology and empower the people in the communities to be the solution for their problems.

We have developed offline-first apps that can be used to profile residents, identify at-risk patients, and get them tested at the right time at the right health facilities or through outreach events. Members of the community are equipped as access managers and health workers to run these services on the ground. Additionally, through our e-commerce and distribution platform, we can work with the private sector to ensure affordable treatment is available to those that need it, when they need it. As part of our data collection and community risk profiling, we are collecting hepatitis risk indicators to help targeted screening campaigns where they are needed most.

3-Demonstrate future outcomes to galvanise action now

Many governments simply do not think they have a significant prevalence rate as a comprehensive effort to understand the problem hasn’t been undertaken. Of course, it’s a trade-off: health systems have limited finance, must make choices, and not everything can be funded. Medicines are too expensive for many governments to afford at scale.

Hepatitis will often lead to complex health conditions in the future, so the only way to solve the challenge will be to invest early. We must shift the discussion from short term costs to long term health and economic outcomes. According to WHO, investing in hepatitis testing and treatment services as part of UHC efforts can cut global deaths by 5% and increase healthy life years by about 10% by 2030 – a smart decision for broader health outcomes.

Yet often to galvanise action, government leaders understandably want the data to make decisions and subsequently demonstrate the impact in their communities. This just isn’t available in a rural setting – although the broader healthcare market is moving towards Real World Evidence and outcomes in general. Therefore, it’s critical to both extend health profiling to the undiagnosed and disconnected, and use forecasting to demonstrate downstream cost savings as a result of early interventions.

Existing partnership models aren’t working and a radical new approach to public-private partnership is needed. On World Hepatitis Day, it’s time to change how we’re combatting hepatitis in low-and middle-income countries by fully harnessing the new technologies and opportunities available.

One of the speakers in the prestigious TEDxSingapore held on Saturday 11th November was Allied World Healthcare’s very own CEO Edward Booty!

Ed joined a lineup of other thought-leaders for a day of learning, collaboration and discussion about some of the most challenging issues we face today, along with innovative solutions to try and solve them. Ed’s passion centers around creating disruptive, digital health models to connect the last-mile, and truly rethinking financing approaches to ensure sustainability of healthcare services for underserved communities – not relying on grants or charity. This drove him to establish AWH less than two years ago and still fuels his drive to deliver healthcare services to all underserved communities throughout the world.

In his talk, he discussed some of the major challenges faced in healthcare today, shared stories of working in the Philippines, outlined the core Allied World Healthcare model, and shared how some of the low-cost, collaboration-driven delivery principles can be applied to developed healthcare systems (such as Singapore, and the UK).

Ed and the AWH team thanks TEDxSingapore for the invitation. Click on this link to watch Ed in his TED Talk!

After an exciting-yet-challenging project, Allied World Healthcare (AWH) and Singapore Management University (SMU) are proud to announce that MediConnect is live, and being used by clinicians throughout the Philippines.

The digital healthcare platform has been built to connect health care workers with essential information and training modules for a range of different scenarios – ranging from specialist doctors to rural health workers. On top of this, a communication and collaboration platform has been built for secure health worker messaging and file sharing.

Critical to the approach is sharing existing content from partners, as AWH would be unable to create all information needed by all healthcare workers. Our team will be working with health providers, academic institutions and publishers in more developed healthcare systems – and then take their content and tailor it for a new audience. This partnership-driven approach will keep operational costs lower, whilst ensuring a foundation of world-leading content can be made available to healthcare workers throughout the world.

With a determination to improve service implementation and reach the farthest, most-disconnected rural areas, Allied World Healthcare is proud to announce the launch of offline-first, Android Curis!

After one of the biggest and most challenging tasks Allied World Healthcare (AWH) has taken on to date, the expansive patient support platform is being implemented throughout South East Asia, giving communities and patients support – as well as primary health clinics a portal to coordinate their services and view critical data insights.

After several real-world trials in rural and urban areas, AWH has worked intensely to improve Curis. Its first version was an online platform built with National University of Singapore and other leading technology organisations. However, since AWH is determined to deliver healthcare, everywhere, the organisation decided to transform Curis into an offline-first Android application given the very-low to no-connectivity-at-all in the areas that need most healthcare access  support.

Curis 2.0 can now run with or without internet connectivity , and can function in low-spec, low-cost Android devices – maximising the reach and equity of access, whilst keeping operational costs low. This has been a major breakthrough in the organisation’s service delivery model as the greatest challenge of delivering digital health in rural, disconnected, but most-in-need communities has been overcome; allowing digital health support to reach further than ever before.

AWH also improved the features of Curis 2.0 to include more information related to healthcare services such as: health information, education articles, appointment booking, event management, peer-to-peer syncing and data sharing, and real-time data aggregation (with insights and reporting dashboards for a range of healthcare leaders). The future Curis roadmap includes chat, a marketplace of partner products and services, and much more!

Jim Poole, CTO of AWH, said: “Building systems in the modern world is getting easier, but this relies on expensive devices and strong internet for much of the time. Engineering for lower-income, underserved and offline communities presents a huge array of challenges. I am incredibly proud of our development team for delivering this complex project using a range of bleeding-edge technology to really try and tackle healthcare inequality”

And since Curis was launched in the Philippines, AWH ensured that it is fully compliant with the Data Privacy Act of 2012, and is registered in the National Privacy Commission. All data stored in Curis is fully encrypted, and well-managed by the organisation’s Infrastructure and Security team.

It is available in three languages (English, Hiligaynon and Khmer), with more languages planned in 2019.

Continuing with our mission to ‘Deliver Healthcare, Everywhere’, Allied World Healthcare (AWH) has successfully launched our first project in Siem Reap province, Cambodia.

Working alongside Temple Garden Foundation (TGF, a well-established local charity), AWH held launch events in Oklong and Tapo Muoy villages on September 25 and October 2 2018 respectively. Each community health services event was attended by more than one hundred villagers with their children for health lectures on nutrition, blood pressure screening, height and weight checks and an orientation to the Allied World model and future benefits.

These village launches will be followed by three other villages in rural Siem Reap in the coming weeks.

Local Village Health Support Group (VHSG) workers were also trained to support and strengthen the grassroots implementation of the project, using Allied World’s Curis application to collecting information and insight on local community needs. At least two VHSG workers per village were trained, equipped, and continuously supported by AWH and TGF for the project. The event was delivered in partnership with the local Commune Health Centre.

For over 200 residents profiled, it was found out that only 40% has their own personal toothbrush, 39% having clean water source in their houses.

These launch events are just the start of many AWH projects that will be held in the villages. Future projects will be driven by the aggregated- data and insights, allowing AWH and TGHF to tailor-fit outreach campaigns and events with actual community needs.

AWH will continue to provide access family healthcare to everyone, visit our website for updates.

Allied World Healthcare (AWH), an all access healthcare provider, is proud to announce that the organisation has been selected for Startup Station Singapore, run by Facebook and the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA).

“We are excited to introduce the 11 startups who will be Startup Station Singapore’s first batch of startups! During the process of selection, we received hundreds of applications to our programme, and have met so many talented entrepreneurs. It was an exciting process and a huge welcome to QSearch, Envolve Data, Qlue, jumper.ai, Peoplewave, Allied World Healthcare, DRVR, Newswav, GigaGigs, Vouch and Waitrr. Congrats to selected startups! It is going to be a wild ride for the next few months, and we can’t wait to see what you’re capable of!”, said Facebook Singapore on their official announcement via their Page.

The programme allows AWH to transform their technology user experience, data analytics, consent models, marketing and user engagement; bringing in skills from across the global Facebook group to support the strategy, design and delivery of future programmes. This is hand-in-hand with the IMDA and a leading regulator, helping provide input to policy and governance in the region.

Edward Booty, CEO of AWH, said: “Following three tough months of interviews, I am delighted that we have been accepted to Startup Station Singapore. This allows us to improve our product and service with leading global innovators; elevating us to the next level in our growth. Thank you to Facebook and the IMDA, and we are looking forward to the programme.”

The programme will last for 6 months, covering three in-person training sprints, technical support, access to a range of tools, mentoring and strategic input. There will be a showcase Demo Day at the end of the programme, involving the startup, corporate and investor community in late August.