South African-based medical technology start-up Essential Medical Guidance (EMGuidance) has won the Merck Health Tech Prize at the annual Seedstars World Global Finals in Switzerland.
The start-up will be joining the Merck Accelerator with financial support of up to EUR50 000 (about R745 000) and office space at the Merck Innovation Centre, mentoring and coaching.
In 2017, EMGuidance won the South African leg of the Seedstars World competition and on 12 April, the start-up competed against 75 other start-ups from around the world for the title of Seedstars Global Winner.
EMGuidance is a socially minded company born out of the Open Medicine Project, a not-for-profit which empowers more than 300 000 healthcare professionals in 200 countries around the world through digital information access.
Doctors, clinicians and other medical professionals use EMGuidance to access free clinical locally relevant guidelines, medicines and care co-ordination information to make better, more informed decisions that improve patient outcomes.
EMGuidance launched its clinical facilitation in the middle of last year. The two founders are medical doctors Yaseen Khan and Mohammed Dalwai. The platform is made available free of charge to medical professionals and provides locally relevant clinical guidelines, clinical tools and information on medicines.
"The SeedStars Health Tech prize is a global recognition and spotlight on the significant health system problems that exist in the developing and emerging markets, and that ground-up technology enabled healthcare solutions, provided they have the right innovative business models and outlook towards private sector partnership and involvement, are trusted to be economically viable, scalable and can address widespread need across healthcare systems, says Khan, CEO of EMGuidance.
"We look forward to building on this success as we prepare our expansion into other African countries."
The platform creates an environment in which players within the ecosystem are able to provide contextually relevant information to help medical professionals giving treatment at the point-of-care, says Khan.
Accessed via Android and iOS apps, the clinical guidelines are published on behalf of a growing number of medical institutions and the Department of Health. Khan notes the start-up currently publishes guidelines for over 20 medical institutions.
Meanwhile, the overall 2018 Seedstars Global winner is Ghanaian agritech start-up AgroCenta.
AgroCenta won up to $500 000 (about R6 million) in equity investment and some unique growth opportunities at the Seedstars Summit 2018.
"Agrocenta won this prize because of the disruption they are creating in the farming industry," says Pierre-Alain Masson, co-founder at Seedstars.
"It's very important that investors know that talent is everywhere and that the way start-ups and tech entrepreneurs in emerging markets are addressing the underlying social challenges in their home countries, be it agriculture or access to finance, basic education, healthcare or energy supply, is a tremendous business trend and opportunity."
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