South African Healthcare platform, RecoMed, raises $1.5m in funding round
According to reports, RecoMed, South Africa’s largest online healthcare booking platform, has raised a $1.5 million funding round. The round was led by Vunani Fintech Fund, a South African venture capital firm. RecoMed claims to have put up $1 million, with the balance split between previous investors AAIC, a Japanese but Africa-focused venture capital firm, Growth Grid Venture Capital Partners, and Push Ventures, a Kenyan firm.
RecoMed’s ground-breaking technology platform, which was founded by Internet entrepreneur Sheraan Amod in 2013, allows digital patient bookings into healthcare facilities across South Africa, generating new business for healthcare providers. Because of its unique blend of industry-wide integrations and experience dealing with a variety of healthcare provider groups, the company has established itself as the market leader in healthcare bookings.
Its mobile platform enables patients to find and schedule appointments with quality healthcare providers at any time, eliminating the need for phone calls or paperwork. The company claims that every month, it connects over 200,000 patients and 1,500 physicians, an increase of 700% in just 18 months. Patients can use the website or app to search and browse practitioner profiles, read ratings, and then schedule a physical or virtual telehealth session.
Healthcare practitioners, businesses, and insurers all use the platform in different ways, according to the company. RecoMed’s platform can be utilized independently or in conjunction with an external Practice Management System (PNS), which is a software application used to run medical and healthcare practices. For enterprises, RecoMed is white-labelled to allow booking and telehealth functionality for patient customer groups.
The platform was one of the first in Africa to implement telehealth, launching years before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the necessity for such platforms became clear. RecoMed’s business concept is to charge healthcare providers a transactional “per booking” fee for any bookings made through the platform. Its healthcare customers benefit from increased patient booking flow as a result of the aggregated marketplace.
“Every year, we facilitate about R250 million [$16 million] in healthcare spending.” We make it simple and quick for patients to get a convenient doctor appointment or the COVID-19 vaccine jab,” Amod said in a statement.
According to the CEO, the pandemic resulted in a net increase in RecoMed consumption. He adds that the company’s revenue has more than doubled since March of this year.
“The user-friendly platforms and applications we’ve created considerably aid this progress and suit people’s lifestyles, allowing them to interact 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from wherever they are, through phone, PC, or tablet.” For example, we discovered that 70% of patient appointments take place after hours.”
RecoMed intends to use the funds to expand its platform in 2022 with additional integrated products. Integrated online medical payments and e-pharmacy for delivering prescription drugs to consumers across the country are just a few examples. It also plans to expand geographically in addition to releasing new products, with the company starting in Kenya in January 2022.
In Africa, health tech has distinct infrastructure issues. Market factors and the patchwork of healthcare systems in place in Africa, have made it necessary to develop indigenous healthcare technology solutions to African issues.
Amod believes that the go-to-market strategy for broad-based health-tech solutions should include a strong B2B2C component, leveraging key partnerships with insurers, banks, and telecommunications companies to reach a broad consumer audience – which RecoMed is doing. “The future of health innovation is an exciting arena for Africa as we continue to provide the global market a scalable solution at low cost-and, when appropriate, with minimal bandwidth,” he said.
“We are still in the early days of leveraging technology as a utility in healthcare, so the potential here is huge,” Vunani Fintech Fund, the lead investor, said via its director Mark Anderson, enthused about RecoMed’s planned method to satisfy recognized market gaps in South Africa. We are certain that this current round of fundraising will make a significant contribution to improving the health ecosystem’s efficiency, which will benefit all stakeholders.”
RecoMed’s services include SMS integration, which allows your employees to easily call patients and never miss an appointment. It enables you to give your patients easy access to your RecoMed profile for appointments and bookings. Simply add a RecoMed link to your website, or if you don’t have one, the RecoMed online profiles function as stand-alone web pages, and patients searching for you will see your profile directly on Google results or within their RecoMed search results.
With simply an Internet connection and a web browser, you can publish all of your available appointments online, directly through its practice management software integrations. Details of online appointments show at your front desk in real-time without any effort on your side. Support people are also on standby to assist.
