When Dr Mercy Mutahi worked in Kenya’s healthcare system, she began noticing a problem that was easy to overlook.
Healthcare facilities could have the right buildings, equipment and systems, yet still struggle to provide efficient care when the healthcare professionals needed to operate those systems were unavailable, poorly distributed or difficult to coordinate.
That experience led Mutahi, a medical doctor, to found Ashacare Medical Solutions in 2018, a Kenyan health technology company working to improve how healthcare professionals and facilities connect, work and manage their workforce.
Today, the company is building HealthShift, a digital platform designed to provide infrastructure for managing the healthcare workforce, from verification and recruitment to scheduling, attendance, performance and workforce deployment.
For Mutahi, the problem goes beyond simply finding someone to cover a vacant shift.
“A facility can have good infrastructure, equipment and systems, but if the right healthcare professionals are not available, appropriately qualified, properly deployed or accountable for their work, the quality and efficiency of care can still suffer,” she said.
That challenge is particularly significant in Kenya, where the country faces a needs-based shortfall of roughly 60,000 healthcare professionals, according to Strathmore University. The shortage is compounded by uneven distribution, meaning that the availability of healthcare workers can vary significantly between locations and facilities.
HealthShift was initially created as a way for healthcare facilities to connect with verified professionals when they needed additional staff.
But as the company worked with healthcare providers, Mutahi and her team realised that staffing was only one part of a much larger problem.
Information about healthcare professionals can be scattered across individual facilities, informal networks, professional records and separate institutional systems. A professional may work across multiple facilities while their availability, engagement history and other workforce information remains fragmented.
Ashacare’s response has been to build what it describes as a connected workforce layer.
The platform brings together verified healthcare professionals and facilities, location-based workforce matching, recruitment, locum opportunities, scheduling, attendance tracking, performance management, ratings and reviews.
The objective is to make healthcare workforce activity more visible, traceable and useful for both facilities and health-system decision-makers.
According to the company, HealthShift has onboarded more than 55 hospitals and more than 1,500 verified healthcare professionals, while facilitating almost 6,000 shifts. Its average time to fill a shift is less than six hours.
For Mutahi, the recurring nature of the problem has also created the foundation for a two-sided network.
As more healthcare facilities join the platform, professionals gain access to more opportunities. As more verified professionals join, facilities have a larger pool from which to find qualified workers.
The company’s business model combines facility subscriptions and transaction fees, allowing revenue to grow alongside workforce activity on the platform. Ashacare says it is already generating revenue and is working towards building a self-sustaining marketplace.
But the company’s ambitions extend beyond Kenya.
Ashacare is currently focused on deepening adoption across Kenya, expanding into additional healthcare sectors and counties and strengthening relationships with health-system stakeholders. Its longer-term plan is to take the model into East Africa and other African markets.
The company recently participated in the Standard Chartered Foundation’s Women in Tech Accelerator, implemented by Strathmore University’s iBiz Africa with support from Village Capital.
For Mutahi, the programme provided an opportunity to examine the business more closely, particularly its financial management, strategy, market understanding and approach to fundraising.
One lesson stood out for her: capital should follow strategy.
“ You should understand where the business is weak, what needs to be built, what needs to be tested and where capital will have the greatest impact before the money arrives,” she said.
Ashacare is now fundraising to expand HealthShift and develop what Mutahi sees as a broader piece of healthcare infrastructure.
The ambition is not simply to create another application for healthcare professionals.
Every verified professional adds information to the workforce network. Every participating facility creates more opportunities and context. Every completed engagement produces additional operational information that can help make the system more responsive.
That is the infrastructure opportunity Mutahi believes could eventually transform how healthcare workforce activity is managed across African health systems.
“We are not trying to build another isolated healthcare application,” she said. “We are building the infrastructure that can make healthcare workforce activity more connected, visible, accountable and responsive.”
Mutahi did not initially set out to become an entrepreneur.
Her background in medicine simply kept bringing her back to the same question: how could the system work better?
Entrepreneurship became the vehicle through which she could attempt to answer that question at scale.
Today, her mission is to use technology to strengthen healthcare systems, improve accountability and contribute to better patient care across Africa.
For a continent facing significant healthcare workforce shortages, the solution may not only be about training more professionals.
It may also be about building better systems for understanding where those professionals are, what they are qualified to do, when they are available and how they can be deployed effectively.
That is the problem Mercy Mutahi is trying to solve, one healthcare professional, one facility and one shift at a time.
