SA e-Health Start-Up Vula Mobile Announces Its Partnership With Novartis
SA e-Health Start-Up Vula Mobile Announces Its Partnership With Novartis. South African e-Health startup Vula Mobile has announced its strategic partnership with Novartis. With this partnership the startup aims to improve eye care services in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Through a digital platform, primary health care workers can get connected with specialists to enable faster assessment of eye conditions and to optimise the way patients seek care in the rural outskirts.
The strategic partnership aims to empower primary care facilities in providing service for adequate eye care, improve the quality of referrals to specialist centers and assist health administrators in making data driven decisions at a health system level. Primary health workers – from nurses, general practitioners and allied health workers, will use Vula to connect asynchronously to specialists on call to discuss their patients.
“According to data generated, we have learned that in an average of 30% of the cases, the eye specialist gives medical advice via the app or on the online portal, enabling the patient to be treated and managed by the primary health worker. This saves the patient travel time, improves health care delivery, upskills the primary health worker and decreases the burden at the local specialist service,” said Dr William Mapham, Founder and CEO of Vula Mobile in a statement.
Vula is a medical referral app and online platform that makes it easy for primary healthcare workers to get advice from and refer patients to specialists. Vula connects clinicians to each other and their patients, with a seamless, integrated, secure platform, in order to deliver high quality, cost effective, accessible healthcare.
The three-year partnership will commence with a pilot program in Namibia and Botswana, with focus on eye health. Plans to expand the collaboration in other countries across SSA in other therapeutic areas will ensue, following the successful completion of the first phase of the partnership.
