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ASIA • HEALTHCARE
Nadia Mykhalevych
FEBRUARY 20, 2020
This time, we had a talk with our alumni in the healthcare industry – CMED Health, a Bangladeshi startup that is focusing on preventive healthcare. We managed to talk with the company Co-Founder & Head of Growth Moinul H. Chowdhury and find out what the current state of their business is, what the team’s plans for the future are and how do they envision their place in global healthcare.
In Bangladesh, there are four major issues with healthcare. First, there is no referral system. Patients don’t have a structured primary healthcare system which can route them to the next level of health services. Second, healthcare is unaffordable due to no health insurance system in Bangladesh. Third, there is no individual health record which forces doctors to treat their patients with less information. It all culminates into the 4th issue, two-thirds of deaths in Bangladesh happen due to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In 2016 only, almost 600,000 people died from NCDs, and the number is increasing every year. With our product, we aim to address each of these problems. We currently have a platform used by over 50,000 people that connects healthcare service providers with people who are in need of that service. This allows for referring the patient to the next level of care, create an individual health record for each user and raise awareness among the users about NCDs and advise them on how to prevent them.
Our biggest success in terms of recognition would be winning the Innovation Award at the Seedstars Summit 2018. Winning a major recognition on the world stage has brought a massive amount of interest, awareness and praise from everyone. This also helped us understand the global market, players and how we can forge our way forward. In business terms, our partnership with one of the largest NGOs in Bangladesh to utilize our platform for healthcare delivery would be our biggest success.
Honestly, I wouldn’t change a thing. The hiccups we had, the stumbles we faced all helped us become what we are today. Without the experience paved with difficulties, you can not become successful. I’d keep things as they are, and maybe write down the winning lottery numbers in the past few years!
Our experience shows the best way to communicate is through a human connection. Our health agents are the face of our company, and through them, our customers know who we are and what value we’re creating.
We believe the work we are doing can create a massive tectonic change in the healthcare paradigm. Everything we see now is subject to change with the help of technology, and our aim is to be at the forefront of the change. We believe the work we’re doing is expandable to other socio-economic landscape. With proper support, we can completely change the way healthcare delivery is running right now.
With utmost privacy and security in mind. Although there are no strong regulations established in Bangladesh about this, we understand this to be of the utmost priority.
We believe quality is better than quantity. Our plan is to first firmly establish our foundation and then grow bigger. As Bangladesh is our first market, we want to expand and stabilize our business here and then expand to similar markets with a proven methodology and established product.
Winning a major recognition on the world stage has brought a massive amount of interest, awareness and praise from everyone. This also helped us understand the global market, players and how we can forge our way forward.
Seedstars mentoring sessions helped us a lot to stabilize our business and develop different policies for the company. Especially, the control tower helped us a lot in governing our new services and products. Seedstars is one of our investors, which added more recognition amongst the investor community.
Startup’s toolkit
This might be an interesting fact for a startup that our team members age vary from 19 to 59.
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, at first it was boring, then it turned to be intriguing, then it became mesmerising and at the end of the book, I was fervently jotting down what I comprehended from the book at the fear of forgetting everything the next morning.
