Marcus Richards
Kapsule’s mission is to drive forward Accessible Affordable and Authentic healthcare by enabling the systematic use of healthcare data.
We connect to existing; electronic medical record/ healthcare provider management systems, enterprise resource planning systems to capture, aggregate, process and predict medicine demand based on anonymised health records.
With this data we reduce administrative burdens, increase doctor utilisation, improve medicine/staff forecasting demand, as well as identify trends and seasonality in diseases.
Our core values are Integrity, Humility and Hardworking.
Tell us about yourself?
I began my academic career as a scientist (geneticist) but quickly realised that my strengths were in business and communication, so decided against pursuing academia and went into pharmaceutical consulting.
I quickly became the world’s youngest expert in the pharmaceutical industry and spoke at world renowned forums like the World Brand Safety and Anti-Counterfeiting Summit, Pharmacovigilance Europe and Worldwide Clinical Trial Forum.
During this time I learned about the huge issues with medicine accessibility in emerging markets, particularly in Africa, as a result of poor data and information on these markets.
Together with my Co-Founders Hannan Hashmi, who saw the challenges on the ground in Africa while working at a hospital in Kenya, and Femi Amoo (an enterprise software software developer who worked in the pharma space). Together we felt that we could build a solution to solve these issues.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Be obsessed about the problem, users, and customers. The product will mould itself around those three.
What problem does your business solve?
There is no way to use the vast quantity of healthcare data to inform critical business decisions, resulting in very reactive decision making.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
All of the founding team have a background in the healthcare industry and have worked with healthcare providers, multinational organisations, and governments. Independently we all saw the same root causes to the issues that these different institutions faced.
Limited data usage made evidence based decision making almost impossible. We felt that the biggest thing we could do to help the health system as a whole is to build a baseline architecture to enable proactive decision making.
We help healthcare providers to use their own data to drive KPI to improve financial performance and patient outcomes. We then aggregate anonymised data from many healthcare providers to gain market wide intelligence, which we can then sell to Market Intelligence teams within pharmaceutical companies to drive their commercial activities/campaigns.
What is your magic sauce?
We are EMR/EHR/ERP agnostic and can pool data from the different systems in one place to enable us to gain insights across systems, while bringing cloud functionality to previously offline databases.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We will have a complete view of supply and demand of medicines across emerging markets. From this we can help pharmaceutical companies and governments close supply and demand gaps.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
The challenges are endless, we’ve had to navigate limited funding, projects getting pulled, client deals getting halted/frozen, staff resignations, hiring challenges, product development challenges etc.
However I’d say that getting institutions to truly appreciate the value of data once it is aggregated and translated to information is the biggest challenge we’ve faced.
Healthcare providers have been sitting on a goldmine of data which was in an unusable zip file format on premise, which in isolation is not worth much, but once combined with many different healthcare provider’s data become incredibly valuable for industry.
We changed course several times due to slow sales cycles, readiness of the market for our solution, and product development cost.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want to connect with EMR/EHR/ERP companies that operate to Africa. They can learn how we can work together to commercialise their data.
We want to speak with pharmaceutical companies who are interested to learn about the true on the ground demand for medicines in Africa.
