AlemHealth poised to change healthcare in underdeveloped countries

AlemHealth, an innovative service and platform, is poised to change the way healthcare is offered in developing nations through a system that is both affordable and error free. The United Arab Emirates-based startup is vastly improving the way patients in developing countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are diagnosed and treated for major illnesses.

“What our service and our platform allow is that anyone that wants to get healthcare, regardless of where they are, is able to access it,” said co-founder and CEO Aschkan Abdul-Malek. “Anyone that wants to give health care, regardless of where they are, is able to provide it. If we are able to do that, we are cutting out one of the largest constraints to health care, which is the efficiency at which resources are distributed.”

AlemHealth provides a connection between patients in developing countries and physicians in India, the United States and the European Union. Patients receive a diagnosis in as little as three hours, or 24 hours at the most. According to Abdul-Malek, the team’s presence in the hospitals they work with makes them stand apart from other telemedicine solutions.

In the nine hospitals they are currently working with in Afghanistan, AlemHealth has implemented software and hardware that works with the country’s technology restraints. While keeping things like bandwidth in mind, they have built a system that is both ground-based, in the sense that they are connected to the hospital’s machines, and cloud-based, where all of the patient’s records are available online and can be accessed from anywhere.

The key, says Abdul-Malek, is creating a relationship with the hospital.

“We operate in places that no one trusts anyone else,” he said. “That's challenging because that's actually the glue that keeps together most commercial systems. When you take away trust, everything gets more difficult."

The team at AlemHealth tested the quality of the hospital’s equipment, and ensured the technicians knew how to use them properly. They ensure that every scan transmitted over the system is done properly, so that doctors overseas have an accurate file to view. Often this means correcting years of bad habits.

Abdul-Malek cites an incident where they found that technicians consistently only did half the required mammogram screening, local doctors had no issue and would read them anyway. Once AlemHealth explained the significance of full mammogram testing to them, they immediately began to improve the quality of tests, which positively impacted the rate of early detection.

“We are steadily increasing the technician quality in the country because we give feedback on every single transmission on our platform,” said Abdul-Malek. “So we’re seeing the failure rates from our technicians plummet.”

Though the team at AlemHealth has less than six months of operations under its belt, Abdul-Malek says the company's stringent quality controls are paving the way for innovation in healthcare and diagnostics in underdeveloped countries.