Kenyan health startup, Nadia, offers telemedicine services amid COVID-19 pandemic.

Kenyan health startup, Nadia is offering telemedicine services amid the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Nadia is a personalised automated health companion app which provides users with access to consultations with doctors in real-time.

The startup focuses on telemedicine for non-urgent primary care in order to save its patients time and money as well as reducing the pressure on healthcare infrastructure.

In an interview with Disrupt Africa, co-founder of Nadia, Olamide Akomalefe said, “This has taken on a more profound meaning in the response to the COVID-19 crisis. We had shared our concerns about the state of the primary healthcare system and how non-urgent primary care could be delivered more efficiently at a high quality.”

The Nadia app connects patients and doctors remotely for non-urgent primary care while referring complex cases to specialists.

“We handle the most straightforward cases which millions of people tend to fall into and can be easily sorted out. This gives our partners in the diagnostics and lab fields predictable  requests or orders,” Akomalafe further said.

Nadia currently has 400 active users for its second phase beta but has plans of opening its product to help ease the pressure on infrastructure during the pandemic.

Even though the startup’s head office is in Nairobi, it is a pan-African entity since the solution is available in Nigeria, Ghana and Tanzania. Akomalafe said it is making a physical expansion policy across the continent.

Nadia charges a commission on each consultation fee but has reduced its prices during the COVID-19 crisis. The startup is also offering a free coronavirus risk assessment to help people access accurate information and medical attention as quickly as possible.

Nadia was founded in 2019 after Akomalafe and fellow co-founders Ahmed Elmi, Victor Okech and Funsho Olaniyi met at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, Ghana.