Alignd recently partnered with South African tech business Signapps™, which has developed Signapps™ Care, a care-co-ordination platform. The platform is a core component in the delivery of Alignd’s value-based care model. We chatted to Signapps™ founder Andrew Davies about the platform and his motivation behind starting the business.
Alignd: What is the significance behind the development of Signapps™ Care platform?
Davies: Our mobile messenger and web applications provide secure and user friendly channels for healthcare professionals to collaborate and share confidential patient data. Our product is affordable, simple to use and solves the problem of keeping care teams engaged around the care of specific patients.
The key to our success so far has been putting the patient at the centre of conversations. As we have grown, our platform is becoming a point of integration for communication of information between different role-players in healthcare including hospitals, suppliers of products and services, medical schemes and patients.
Alignd: What motivated you to start the business?
Davies: We identified communication as a massive problem in healthcare both locally and globally. 70% of all preventable mishaps in healthcare happen as a result of miscommunication or no communication. This has been quantified as a $340bn problem globally (Institute of Medicine Data). We saw an opportunity to transform how patients are being cared for in South Africa and emerging markets. Our vision is to be the simplest, most effective and appropriate care coordination platform for people and organisations in emerging markets.
Alignd: Who uses SignApps™? To what effect?
Davies: Our users are health care practitioners, administrative personnel and healthcare organisations, who use the product to stay engaged with their teams around the care of specific patients. Our customers (typically hospitals and practices) pay for use of the product to stay compliant with data privacy legislation, drive cost efficiencies through digitisation and improve the quality of care of patients through better communication.
Alignd: Comment on the Alignd application of SignApps™ and your partnership?
Davies: There is a strong fit between the practice of palliative care and the Signapps™ Care platform. Effective palliative care necessitates management by a multi-disciplinary team. This team would typically comprise a team capable of addressing the clinical, physical, psychosocial and spiritual needs of the patient. Problems in the palliative care process often stem from inadequate communication among these stakeholders; therefore, most effective resolution strategies aim to improve communication, clarify values, and align goals, values, and prognosis.
Signapps™ Care puts the patient at the centre of the conversation between the multi-disciplinary team and will be the platform that underpins the coordination of care between teams affiliated to Alignd value-based care programs.
Collaboration lies at the heart what Alignd is, how they work and their sense of purpose – Andrew Davies.
Our purpose is to transform how patients are being cared for in South Africa and emerging markets. The partnership made natural sense.
Alignd: What difference do you think the Signapps™ platform will make?
Davies: Conversation remains an important medium for resolving problems in healthcare generally. Facilitating real-time conversations between healthcare teams, patients and families, in the palliative care space is fundamental to patients being able to die in their place of choice, receive the highest quality of care from a diverse and distributed team whilst at the same time delivering a service cost effectively.
Signapps™ solves these problems by connecting multi-disciplinary teams in a real-time virtual environment; and facilitates the sharing of structured data about the patient between these teams.
Alignd: Why do you do what you do?
Davies: I love cutting-edge technology, the process of creating product and have always had a strong desire to help people.
