Innovations Lead
Maisha MedsMaisha Meds is focused on improving healthcare quality, affordability, and access in Africa. Since incorporating in 2017, we have grown to support over 150,000 patients monthly across Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with our suite of software products. Our network of pharmacies and clinics use our restocking system to order medicines from high-quality suppliers, and we’re testing a variety of payment systems and incentive structures to improve patient uptake of high-impact health products like malaria diagnostics and treatment, antenatal care commodities, and contraceptives. We measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare commodities for low-income patients across Africa.
The organization is at an exciting inflection point – we are currently testing our digital reimbursement model for improving malaria diagnosis and treatment alongside health economics research partners and global health funders. We are currently expanding our efforts in Tanzania and Uganda, with other countries to follow. We are moving towards supporting digital reimbursement for the 16 core areas that make up Universal Health Coverage (UHC) as defined by the World Health Organization. And we have begun to partner with global health funders, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers to ensure that the diagnostics and therapies required to support UHC are always available at the last mile, no matter how far that last mile might be.
The role has three primary responsibilities:
Systems design and development: Working directly with the COO, you will integrate new models and programs into the operations team to improve operational efficiency. Possible workstreams include:
Small-scale operational R&D and field trials: Design small scale trials to test new models, analyze trial data, and report findings to evaluate whether to roll out models across Maisha Meds network. These may include:
Performance management and communication/coordination across operations teams: You will work directly with the COO to design ways to assess the performance of team members and programs. This could include:
We would prefer to have you based in Nairobi, with regular travel to our main office in Kisumu.
Maisha Meds aims to leverage technology to solve problems that affect millions of people across sub-Saharan Africa. Though we can’t offer you catered meals and conference bikes like in Silicon Valley, we can promise you an opportunity to drive real, quantifiable change that literally saves lives. We are dedicated to our work and care deeply about our product’s impact. You’ll join our small and friendly team to grow Maisha Meds into a company serving tens of millions of people.
We are seeking exceptional professionals with 1-4+ years of work experience. We are looking for candidates that will help take our organization to the next level of impact and scale. Candidates who fit the following criteria are strongly encouraged to apply:
About Maisha Meds
Maisha Meds is an organisation dedicated to improving health care in Africa. We began full-time operations in 2017 and over the past few years has grown to support over 4 million patient encounters at over 1,200 pharmacies and drug shops annually across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, and Zambia. We are building the financial and technology infrastructure to enable global health funders to pay for health outcomes at the last mile, with an initial focus on malaria case management. Recent results from a randomised controlled trial with UC Berkeley showed that our programs lead to a statistically significant 350% increase in appropriate and high quality malaria care. Based on these results, we are planning to scale the technology to reach over 10,000 health facilities and 20 million patients, and to directly pay for health outcomes for 1 million patients annually by 2024. In addition, we are actively building programs to support injectable contraceptives, HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, measles and HPV vaccines, malnutrition support, and safe water interventions.
Our work is funded by USAID Development Innovation Ventures, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, Pfizer, and others, and we are starting to build partnerships with multilateral global health funders, pharmaceutical companies, and national health insurance funds to have them pay us on a contract basis for health outcomes. We use data from our point of sale software to design programs that leverage financial incentives to improve uptake of high impact health products. And we measure our success by our ability to improve the quality and affordability of healthcare diagnosis, treatment, and prevention for low-income patients across Africa.