Winners of the health care innovation accelerator program, Up Accelerate, have been announced. The program launched in 2016 seeks to recognize and support innovative solutions to some of the challenges bedeviling the sexual reproductive health sector. The competition is looking for solutions from mainly young innovative Ugandans.
Up Accelerate is an initiative by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in partnership with Outbox. The second leg of the program will commence in October 2017.
The first leg of the acceleration saw 62 submissions from teams of young innovative Ugandans from across the country. That list was further pruned down to just 22 teams, which were later reduced to the best top 10 teams.
Out of the bunch of 10 teams and finalists, the top best four teams were crowned winners of the Up Accelerate competition. They are as follows:
Teheca: This team came up with a mobile app that enables users get caretakers within their proximity. The app also ranks the caretakers in terms of qualification, and thus the user has access to a pool of qualified caregivers to choose from.
Snap HMIS: An app that assists hospital data clerks to gather data on patients conveniently, accurately, and in real-time. It is a Health Management Information System (HMIS) for healthcare data collection.
IDrain: An innovation that has improved the mechanism for draining the chest and removes the pleural effusion content in mothers.
Drug Dash: An information system for health centers and drugs distribution centers to manage their drugs inventory levels especially on the Essential Medicines and Health Supplies (EMHS). Using an analytical dashboard, the drugs inventory levels is closely monitored, and the decision to restock can be made swiftly and in time before shortage is experienced.
The four above winners will walk away having secured $10,000 in seed funding. They will also get business and technical training and mentorship for four months.
Richard Zulu, the Outbox Team Lead said, “We were impressed by the response and level of engagement of young people despite the complexity of the problem areas within which we wanted them to propose solutions.
The amount of conversations, feedback, and effort exhibited during the application period is testimony to the demand of programs like Up Accelerate among the young people in Uganda.”
