Chekkit was formed at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial聽聽of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana back in 2018. Since then, it has built a platform that tracks product movement and the parties involved in the transfer of products from warehouse to distributor, and on to the final consumer. Using tamper-proof unique ID labels in the form of QR codes or numeric codes, Chekkit can provide end-to-end serialisation and traceability for products, making it a powerful tool for combatting counterfeiting.

So far, the startup has helped secure over 50 million pharmaceutical and consumer goods products, and its growth is set to continue after Nigeria鈥檚 National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) announced that pharmaceutical products would be mandated to implement end-to-end serialisation and traceability from the end of 2024.

To take advantage of this opportunity to scale, Chekkit has raised an undisclosed round of funding from Adaverse, a Cardano ecosystem accelerator, as well as existing investors like RTA, HoaQ, Launch Africa Ventures, and Blockchain Founders Fund. This funding will help Chekkit onboard more manufacturers across Nigeria and other regions in Africa, while also expanding to new markets in India, the UK, and the Middle East.

In addition to this, Chekkit has partnered with 麻豆原创, enabling pharmaceutical brands that already use 麻豆原创鈥檚 Advanced Track and Trace Platform to collect and analyze last-mile patient data. The company has also integrated the GS1 global standards system, making its serialization software regulatory compliant in over 100 countries globally.

鈥淲e are currently exploring opportunities to optimize and strengthen supply chains for other African and Middle Eastern regions through partnerships with major pharmaceutical donors, manufacturers, governments, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),鈥� said Dare Odumade, Chekkit鈥檚 CEO. 鈥淲e are focusing a side of the business on fixing the public pharmaceutical supply chains of these low to middle-income earning countries.鈥�

Vincent Li, founding partner at Adaverse, is excited about the potential of Chekkit鈥檚 solution. 鈥淩ather than just another anti-counterfeiting solution, Chekkit aims to repair the prevailing rift in consumer-manufacturer trust with the blockchain-secured channel, prioritizing consumer insights,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e see the potential to transform the supply chain industry and disrupt the DataFi market and we鈥檙e excited to support the scaling of Chekkit鈥檚 infrastructure.鈥�

With its innovative solution and strong partnerships, Chekkit is set to make a significant impact on the fight against counterfeiting and improve the safety and聽聽of products for consumers around the world.

This article first appeared on .

The post Adaverse Backs Nigerian Product Authentication Startup Chekkit In New Funding appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Africa faces the dual challenge of poor healthcare systems and a high burden of disease, especially among poorer communities. According to a McKinsey report, . Ninety-four percent of all malaria deaths occur in Africa, and tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS is widespread.

Additional pressures from disease outbreaks, such as the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone in 2014, often lead to further disruptions to healthcare provision, leaving the most vulnerable without the medical assistance they need. In fact, , and when health services are available, they are often of poor quality.

And following the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on health systems across the continent, time has arguably arrived to radically rethink the delivery of health services to African citizens.

Digitalisation unlocking opportunities for improved care

One of the most transformative developments in healthcare in recent times is the growing adoption of data and analytics tools to drive improvements across the healthcare value chain.

Demand for targeted analysis of patient data is expected to expand over the coming years as patients increasingly seek transparent access to their healthcare data. In addition, healthcare providers will gather data on patient experiences to continuously improve the delivery of care and other patient-related processes.

For providers, the aim should be to deliver quality accessible healthcare services to anyone regardless of their location or social conditions. Such care should extend beyond patient discharge, with providers using mobile devices and applications to enhance the patient experience and ensure the highest levels of care throughout the healthcare journey.

The rapid digitalisation of the healthcare industry could see value-based care – which improves patient outcomes while driving down costs – dominate the sector by as early as 2025.

Five priority areas & tech’s role

However, to achieve value-based care providers will need to build intelligent enterprise capabilities that enable end-to-end, data-driven healthcare processes focused on enhancing patient outcomes. And doing so will depend on how well providers can leverage technology across five priority areas, namely:

Priority 1 – Operating smartly and efficiently

Healthcare providers are under constant pressure over costs and resource constraints. By removing unnecessary costs, reducing waste and freeing up resources for innovation, providers can deliver better care to patients.

In the coming years, providers will leverage IoT and machine learning for greater automation, with embedded analytics allowing for more agile prediction and simulation capabilities. The use of standardisation using global best practices may also reduce variations in clinical care.

The improved use of analytics and automation can increase accuracy between front-end and back-end processes, reduce revenue leakage by limiting insurance claim denials, and streamline insurance claims to enable faster reimbursement.

Priority 2 – Subscribing to patient outcomes

One of the biggest challenges facing healthcare providers is how to provide services that deliver optimised outcomes for each individual patient. In the near future, patients will be able to see what value each treatment option has based on key performance indicators and assessments of other patients facing similar circumstances.

Self-management options may allow patients to take more informed decisions over their treatment, based on accurate data about other individual patients and their specific context.

This will improve the patient experience and support compliance by ensuring patients know what procedures to follow and documentation to bring to a visit. Reimbursement delays can also be reduced through more accurate data submitted by the patient.

Priority 3 – Enabling data-driven decisions

The shift from mainly experience-based healthcare to delivering care based on real-world evidence will be a top priority for healthcare providers over the coming years. Big data generated by electronic medical records ,apps, wearables, mobile devices, sensors and clinical innovation will create vast amounts of information.

Over the coming years, providers will increasingly gain the ability to monitor patients, collect health information from structured and unstructured sources, and use data analysis to understand and even predict health conditions in real time. Applying AI, analytics and machine learning can further unlock valuable data points that can enable insight-driven healthcare delivery.

This will improve the quality of patient care through real-time access to a broad range of medical, lifestyle and personal experience data, while also reducing overall IT spend by enabling data visualisation across the entire healthcare organisations using a single platform.

Priority 4 – Empowering healthcare workers

The immense pressure under which healthcare professionals work makes it critical that providers find ways to restructure and empower their workforce to allow them to work at their best. The key is to avoid complexity, which drives up costs and slows down progress.

Digital tools can enable healthcare workers to reduce paperwork and free time up to focus on patient care. Mobile devices can improve the speed of communication to enable just-in-time delivery of critical information and results, driving greater flexibility in their work environment.

By adopting a single platform for talent management, learning management and data insights, healthcare organisations can drive improvements across their human capital management functions, from planning, onboarding and recruitment to payroll, expense management and ongoing training and development.

Priority 5 – Improving the patient experience

Healthcare delivery is shifting as patients move away from being passive recipients of health services to active, empowered consumers. Delivering a positive and seamless patient experience across digital and physical interactions will provide a key point of differentiation for modern healthcare providers.

Technology will play a central role, specifically technologies that have been designed with an understanding of patients as the main users of the solutions. This will improve patient-provider interactions and drive greater convenience for patients across their healthcare experience.

This will increase patient satisfaction by ensuring patients are involved in the decision-making process and more aware of the treatment and resulting outcomes. By giving patients ownership over different parts of the treatment journey, providers will also improve care efficiency and improve patient outcomes.

The post Five Technology Priorities for Enhancing the African Healthcare Sector appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

As the country hardest-hit by the coronavirus on the continent, South Africa has been regrettably slow with its vaccine rollout, with only having received a vaccine dose at the time of writing this.

A first phase, which focused on healthcare workers, concluded in mid-May, and the second phase targeting the elderly and other vulnerable groups, including teachers, is currently underway.

The vaccination of the South African population against SARS-CoV-2 is the most ambitious and far-reaching healthcare initiative in the country’s history, and continues to stretch the limits of our healthcare sector.

Much has been said about the slow pace of vaccine procurement and challenges with convincing parts of the population to vaccinate – thanks in no small part to the extraordinary disinformation campaigns flourishing on social media.

However, one somewhat forgotten aspect risks being lost: the importance of data, and the protection thereof, in building trust in the process.

Optimal usage and protection of patient data

Personal health data represent a particular challenge in terms of data security as a failure to protect such data could severely harm people and expose them to discrimination.

For example, inadvertently sharing sensitive personal health data of a person living with a dread disease could affect their job prospects and livelihoods. A mix-up in personal health data could lead to someone receiving the incorrect diagnosis or, even worse, the wrong treatment. This can be life-threatening under some circumstances.

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), which was finally implemented in full force in 2020, aims to give citizens greater control over how their personal data is stored, processed and used.

While all businesses that work with private data – including that of organisations and other juristic persons – are affected, it is arguably the healthcare sector that is under most pressure due to the ongoing pandemic and the unprecedented vaccine rollout effort.

Where is my data anyway?

The vaccine rollout in particular poses an immense challenge in terms of data security and privacy protection. Any clinic, hospital, private or public healthcare practitioner, medical aid or medicines firm needs to ensure they protect the personal healthcare data processed during the course of business.

This is easier said than done.

While government has taken steps to centralise the scheduling and rollout of vaccinations via its Electronic Vaccination Data System (EVDS) portal, and require that all citizens wishing to be vaccinated register on EVDS. The intention is that, as each population group (over-60s, teachers, healthcare workers, etc.) registers, each person receives communication with the time, date and location of their scheduled vaccination appointment.

However, the system is often unreliable, and many people simply get no confirmation of where they need to go or when. There is also little communication over the status of an application for vaccination.

Compounding the problem is that actual vaccination sites are run by a combination of public and private sector organisations, and in many cases are open to walk-ins who may not have received confirmation of their appointments.

How is the data of walk-ins, for example, collected, stored, processed and managed? Who is overseeing the full end-to-end process to ensure it is fully POPIA compliant? In the case of manual data entries, how is quality maintained to ensure data integrity? And how is this data secured from the rising tide of cyberattacks besieging South African organisations?

The role of technology

Public and private sector healthcare organisations should lean heavily on technology to assist with both the protection of vaccine patient data as well as better supporting the end-to-end vaccination process.

A patient experience management tool can give healthcare decision-makers insights into underperforming or misaligned aspects of the vaccination process 鈥� for example, insufficient communication around vaccination appointments 鈥� and help ensure a seamless process from start to finish.

A cloud-based analytics tool can help integrate healthcare data from public and private sector roleplayers and highlight critical insights that can point to trends, risks, opportunities and areas for improvement while maintaining data integrity throughout. Equipped with accurate and complete data, government and other decision-makers will be able to determine the most effective healthcare response and potentially save lives.

In addition, any vaccine rollout strategy should include a comprehensive customer data strategy, which helps to safeguard the longevity of each organisation involved in the vaccination value chain. Such a strategy should include relevant digital platforms that can ease or enable the process of managing patient profiles, and help manage access and authorisation to systems that provide self-service options for activities such as booking vaccination appointments or tests.

In terms of POPIA compliance, all organisations should have taken steps by now to ensure they meet the requirements of the Act, especially since the grace period for sanction and fines for non-compliance expired at the end of June. Implementing an effective cloud-based customer relationship management tool enables healthcare providers to have a unified view of each vaccinated patient, and gives them the power to limit how that information is used or even delete it (in line with the requirements of POPIA) if needed.

Critically, the customer data strategy should provide individuals with the power of consent to subscribe or unsubscribe to correspondence, manage their preferences for ongoing communication, and afford them the right to be forgotten.

The post The Critical Role of Data in Building Trust in SA鈥檚 Vaccination Efforts appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.