Our Organization
SnooCODE Limited
What is the name of your solution?
SnooCODERED Healthcare Logistics System
Provide a one-line summary of your solution.
A healthcare logistics system providing an AI-powered mobile clinic to help solve the problem of lack of access to healthcare in the developing world.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Accra, Ghana
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
- Ghana
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The president of the Ghana Medical Association disclosed that according to a survey they conducted among 360 medical doctors in the country, 90% of them had considered leaving Ghana (GhanaWeb, 2022). On average, 500 nurses leave Ghana for the West every month, and the UK now employsmore Ghanaian nurses than Ghana does. (Wilson Center, 2023)
Even more unfortunately, this problem is not limited to Ghana, but is rather quite pervasive across sub-Saharan Africa. According to the WHO, from 2015 data, Liberia had a mere 51 doctors for a population of 4.5 million, and Sierra Leone only had 136 doctors for 6 million people, making the doctor-to-population rate 0.1 and 0.2 per 1,000 people respectively. Egypt’s former health minister lamented that 65% of Egyptian doctors are working abroad, while in Nigeria, 9,000 doctors left to work in the UK, the US, and Canada from 2016 to 2018. (Wilson Center, 2023)
The problem affects the entire population, as we in Ghana contend with 1 doctor to 6,500 (WHO, 2022), against WHO’s recommended 1:1,000, but the people living in poverty are the worst affected. It is reported that 42% of doctors are in the capital Accra alone, and up to 81.3% of all doctors are concentrated in 5 regions (WHO, 2022), all of which are the significant centres of commerce and administration. This means the 11 poorer regions in the country, containing 42.5% of the population (i.e. over 13 million people), are left to be cared for by 18.7% of the country’s doctors.
Beside the human resource deficit, financial challenges, long distances to health facilities, and attitude of health staff were found to influence access to health care among vulnerable populations (Acquah-Hagan et al, 2022). Overall, as of 2021, private and public hospitals were available to 33.9% of urban localities in Ghana, while 1.9% of the rural communities had access to hospitals. Clinics and healthcare centres were available to almost 63% of urban localities, compared to 11.3% for rural residential clusters (Statista, 2023).
The lack of access to healthcare in developing countries like Ghana is the specific problem we are solving.
What is your solution?
SnooCODERED is a family of digital solutions we built for emergency and public healthcare, and epidemiology, aftertheidentification ofour core technology,SnooCODE, by theWHO’s African Network for Drugs and Diagnostics Innovation (ANDI),as “a key technology in providing timely emergency care across Africa and in the battle against infectious and vector-borne diseases,” following the 2014Ebolaoutbreak. Our system for emergency care, SnooCODERED Control Centre (SRCC), enables responders to determine the nearest health assets (ambulance stations; hospitals; pharmacies; individual doctors) to a patient and navigate easily to and from each site, improving response time and chances of survival. SRCC is also capable of dispatching a drone from the user’s location to the emergency site (the user simply enters the 6-digit SnooCODE address of the site) for a quick survey or for first aid medical delivery. A live video feed can be transmitted back by the drone, displayed to the user through SRCC’s interface.
SnooCODERED, a Royal Academy of Engineering Africa Prize alumna, is built on our core proprietary technology, SnooCODE, a digital addressing system using geocoding technology, that allows anybody anywhere on earth to generate a memorable 5- to 7-digit alphanumeric address code (a SnooCODE) for their location and share with anyone else for easy navigation to them or in the case of a drone, the designated location(s). As the first "postal code system and method" for smartphones and other mobile devices (See https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2014080186A3/en), SnooCODE has Prior Art, safeguarding its Intellectual Property. All our systems work offline (without the Internet or even cellular connectivity), including SRCC, making them ideal for use in remote settings, rural and other areas with little or no connectivity. We began integrating AI with SRCC this year through Project “Genie,” for comprehensive decision support and triage, providing a premium version that requires the Internet.SnooCODERED is evolving from a tablet/smartphone emergency control centre into a modular solution that can be assembled and used in 4 different applications: stationary emergency call centre; mobile EMT (ambulance); stationary primary e-healthcare outpost; mobile clinic. Each application has 2 main components in common: satellite Internet; a tablet with the SnooCODERED Control Centre (SRCC) now integrated with AI for quick decision support. Please watch our SRCC product demo here:
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution is designed to expedite health care delivery in resource-constrained settings such as found in Ghana. Our solution is especially suited for emergency, primary care and public health care delivery support.
From estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO), for every ten cases referred by the national ambulance service in Ghana in 2022, one did not receive emergency support either due to lack of ambulances or bed space in receiving hospitals (WHO, 2023). According to the Ghana National Ambulance Service, out of 20,236 patients transported in 2014, only one was attended to within the recommended target response time of less than 8 minutes (Mahama et al, 2018). The median transportation time was 82 minutes and was as high as 552 minutes for some patients. Furthermore, at the hospitals, the reported doctor to patient ratio is 1:6500. 81.3% of doctors are in only 5 regions, and over 60% of doctors are in only 5 teaching hospitals in the country (WHO, 2022). This inequitable distribution of expertise, in a country with a poor emergency response and referral system, spells out disaster. The solution to this problem is multifaceted, and our SnooCODE RED system is designed to mitigate many of these glaring health disparities.
It does this in three ways. Firstly, it helps emergency responders to accurately locate people in need of assistance and to identify and coordinate with the appropriate health assets (with the right resources for the case) closest to the patient to reduce response times. Secondly, it provides first aid instructions to laypersons at the site of the emergency even as they await the arrival of trained emergency responders. Thirdly, it serves as a decision support tool for emergency responders, taking into context the setting and resources available at the location of the emergency. By providing the right context, we are developing solutions tailored to the resource constraints of developing countries.
In our research and development process, we have been engaging with the people our solution would impact, from the people in resource-limited areas of the country to emergency responders and clinicians. We have continuously and iteratively incorporated their feedback into the tools we are building to meet their needs. For example, on a visit to a primary health facility in the Volta Region, the nurse-in-charge shared with us how pregnant women with complicated labours should have had to arrange with a taxi driver prior to the onset of their labour so they could be rushed to a district hospital about 50km away and over unportable roads to receive specialist care as the ambulance service could not be relied on. Furthermore, during interactions with clinicians at a conference by the Emergency Medicine Society of Ghana, they urged us to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities within our solutions to better serve their needs. We have been building our SnooCODE RED Emergency app with these insights to address the pain points of our communities.
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
SnooCODE is a close-knit team of creators, engineers, mathematicians and social scientists working to provide class-leading location-based solutions to power core services around the world.
We have won awards & recognition from several notable institutions, such as the Royal Academy of Engineering, the WHO and the AFD.
We have learnt that this recognition is not solely for our innovation, but also for the deep knowledge we’ve gained living within the context of the problem.
In ensuring that our solution is clinically useful, we seek the input of clinicians who attend to medical emergencies in resource-deprived locations as we build, and we let them evaluate what we have built to ensure that it meets their needs. They have been quantitatively and qualitatively evaluating various iterations of our clinical decision support tool for managing medical emergencies, and we build better based on their feedback.
In trials conducted with West Africa’s 1st accredited training centre for emergency medicine residency, theKomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (KATH)in Kumasi (in the Ashanti Region, where our project will be taking place), we helped reduce response times by as much as 56% with SRCC. After the system was validated, we worked with Ghana’s National Ambulance Service to train over 400 EMTs on its usage. Following that, in 2017, we executed a motorcycle ambulance project together with Oxford University, the National Ambulance Service and KATH, where we trained 60 EMTs in the use of a specially designed “portable toolbox for first-response emergency medicine.”
Our clinical decision support tool is being built by a team of Ghanaians with our Artificial Intelligence (AI) incorporation led by a physician and AI practitioner who has 25+ years of combined living and clinical work experience in the Ashanti Region, our pilot region. We also regularly consult Dr. Bonney, a specialist emergency physician at KATH, and the current president of the African Federation for Emergency Medicine.
Our series of evaluation studies so far have involved 40 clinicians based largely in Accra (capital of Ghana) and in the Ashanti Region, with levels of experience across all ends of the spectrum, from interns to emergency medicine specialists with 12+ years of experience. By iteratively improving our solution based on their feedback, we have seen the percentage satisfaction of clinicians with the differential diagnosis and first aid instructions outputted by our context-aware clinical decision support tool rise from 72% to 80.5%. Please see here for two of our completed studies, one of which has been accepted as a conference publication and the other undergoing peer review: (Study 1:https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.03.24305276,Study 2:https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.04.17.24305971)
Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Increase capacity and resilience of health systems, including workforce, supply chains, and other infrastructure.
Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?
- 3. Good Health and Well-Being
- 9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
- 10. Reduced Inequalities
- 11. Sustainable Cities and Communities
What is your solution’s stage of development?
Prototype
Why are you applying to Solve?
We are applying to Solve because we believe in the power of collaboration to address complex global challenges. Solve's platform provides a unique opportunity to connect with a diverse network of partners who can help us overcome specific barriers and accelerate the impact of our solution.
1.Financial: Access to funding is crucial for scaling our solution and reaching more underserved communities. Solve's network of partners can provide not only financial support but also access to resources and expertise to help us grow sustainably.
2.Technical: As we continue to innovate and evolve our solution, we may encounter technical challenges that require specialized knowledge or resources. Solve's network can connect us with technical experts who can provide guidance and support in overcoming these challenges.
3.Legal: Navigating legal frameworks, especially in different regions or countries, can be complex. Solve's partners can provide legal expertise to help us ensure compliance and navigate any legal barriers that may arise.
4.Cultural: Adapting our solution to different cultural contexts is essential for its success. Solve's network can provide insights and guidance on cultural considerations, helping us tailor our approach to better meet the needs of diverse communities.
5.Market: Understanding and navigating the healthcare market, particularly in underserved communities, is critical for scaling our solution. Solve's network can provide market insights and connections to help us expand our reach and impact.
Overall, we see Solve as a valuable partner in helping us overcome these barriers and advance our mission of improving access to emergency healthcare and epidemiological solutions for underserved communities. We are excited about the opportunity to collaborate with Solve and its partners to create meaningful and sustainable impact.
In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?
- Business Model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development)
- Legal or Regulatory Matters
- Product / Service Distribution (e.g. delivery, logistics, expanding client base)
- Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)
Who is the Team Lead for your solution?
Sesinam Dagadu, Founder and CEO
