Providing an incentive for health
Creating a business mechanism to exchange the prospect of additional income for regular health check-ups.
Pahale is a business concept developed by a team of design strategist bringing their networks and experience in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, India and the U.S to create social healthcare enterprise to prevent chronic diseases in urban slums.
Pahale is a scalable social enterprise that uses mobile technology to create a marketplace linking low-skilled workers with short-term jobs - using that as an incentive to deliver health value. This way, people living in slums are better able to manage and reduce their chronic disease risk while earning a living for them and their families.
Challenge
HULT Prize 2014 challenge was to develop a scalable social healthcare enterprise that serves the needs of 25M slum dwellers suffering from chronic diseases by 2019.
Health services are not only expensive, but they are also difficult to access. Investing time going to the doctor is not variable for most of the people who depend on the limited income they earn each day. Work is inconsistent, and people live in fear of losing their only means to survival. People can't think about tomorrow because the needs of today are too pressing.
We reframed the challenge to re-prioritize preventative care in urban slums.
Process
Leveraging the team's diverse experience and network in India, Latin America and Africa, we conducted research that included direct interaction with slum dwellers, medical practitioners, financial advisors and social entrepreneurs.
We learned that while people want to be healthy, they need income to survive. That was our leverage point.
We identified assumptions and mapped research insights to conceptualize and prototype systems that reinforce value.
The strategy was to create consistent access to income generation opportunities that could create an incentive to conduct regular health checkups as a requirement to access our service.
Value
Pahale creates a path to jobs that put health first.
It improves chronic disease screening & monitoring of a hard to reach population. Creates access to consistent employment opportunities and increases the chances that people living in the slums can diversify their income. Builds a trusted network of workers and mechanisms to support the health of the community. Overtime Pahale can become a platform to enable early detection of mental health illness or patient-controlled health record enhancing the continuity of care.
Outcome
- Business concept pitch deck
/// Contact me if you are interested in obtaining additional information or viewing materials developed for this project.
Project developed in collaboration with:
Alex Ali, Sally Yee, Abinash Pradhan and Isaac Buwembo.
Our team was selected as one of the 300 finalists from 10,000 applicants to pitch a social enterprise start-up idea. We competed in the largest student competition to solve the world's toughest challenges. In 2014, the team presented the business concept to world-class judges during the San Francisco regional final.