What is market creating innovation: A market-creating innovation is more than just a product or a service. It is a system that often generates new infrastructure, regulations, and jobs for people who make, distribute, market, sell, and service the offering.
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Market creating innovations could be analyzed through 4 lenses this include :target audience, market size strength of need level of non-consumption and potential for secondary industry development .
HERE IS HOW LIFESTEN HEALTH FAIRS AGAINST THESE THEMATIC AREAS.
THE MCI POTENTIAL: TARGET AUDIENCE
- Our primary target audience is individuals who are living with or are at risk of developing non communicable diseases either because of family history or are engaged in 3 or more of the NCDs risk factors.
- Secondary target audience– our secondary target audience is health institutions and medical facilities both public and private who need NCDs data collection and management systems for their primary health sector for the facilities.
- Tertiary audience– governments, pharmaceuticals, insurance firms and research institutes who need analyzed and structured data that we collect.
MARKET SIZE
The World health organization carried out a regional (African Region) population-based information research on the key risk factors of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These include tobacco use (12%), alcohol consumption (24%), unhealthy diet (80%), Physical inactivity (24%), overweight (35%), obesity (12%) among others.
People Valuation
The proportion of adults with three or more combined risk factors for NCDs is 24% of the population.
The average prevalence of NCDs risk factors is 31% in Africa, this is 403M people.
- Our TAM is Africa, TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MARKET (Africa)= 31% of 1.3B= 403M people
- SAM is sub-saharan Africa, SERVICEABLE AVAILABLE MARKET (sub-Saharan) = 31% of 1.14B= 353M people
- and SOM is East Africa. SERVICEABLE OBTAINABLE MARKET (East Africa) = 31% of 460M= 142M people
Monetary Valuation
The average annual economic losses per person amounts to US$ 50 in lower middle-income countries while the average total costs per year to a patient/household in LMICs is $ 4440.89.
The cost to the health system + the loss of income due to illness= S 4490.89
- TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MARKET (Africa), 403M x 4490.89= 1.8Trillion
- SERVICEABLE AVAILABLE MARKET (sub-Saharan) = 353M x 4490.89=1.5Trillion
- SERVICEABLE OBTAINABLE MARKET (East Africa) = 142M x 4490.89=637.7 BiIlion
The market size potential for this is actually on the rise and as more and more people become health conscious, and with more development and growth, the number of people living with NCDs is only projected to continue to rise and as a result the continuous rise in the target audience
STRENGTH OF NEED
As earlier discussed, there is a huge need to improve literacy for non-communicable diseases and to provide access to early diagnosis and case management.
The People’s Struggle
- Having decided to focus on addressing this wicked problem, we know very well that addressing a health challenge that involves prevention is a unique challenge because people do not want to do the things that could make them healthy, health is a long term commitment and does not have the immediate gratification and that people mostly interact with the health system after they have been sick. With this unique context in mind at Lifesten health we have engaged with the various audiences in the health system to identify what is the struggle that people face that we can address in line with the problem we are trying to address, these include the following:
- Access to personalized information on awareness of health status – as opposed to getting generalized information on health and wellbeing, people want access to personalized information on their health care, when the information is personalized, people will engage with it since it now affects them directly. Need to know their health status – people want to have peace of mind, they want to know how healthy they are and if there was a way that was efficient that they could access to tell them how healthy they are people would want that, and this is the primary reason why people flock free medical camps. Access to diagnostic services – this ties up with the above struggle, people especially those who live with these diseases or have family members who live with these diseases would want to have access to diagnostic services that help them monitor and manage their health conditions.
- Solving hospital inconveniences – as it is there are a lot of long queues, fragmentation of service delivery 8 provision of generalized health information in the health facilities. This is the reason why most people do not go to hospital for diagnostics and early management because of these inconveniences. Cost incurred – health care is generally expensive, people not only spend out of pocket expenditure, insurance and transport cost, they also pay for the time spent at the facility.
Industry Struggle
The industry struggle is what the health industry is currently struggling with and its areas in which they need innovation and help in. we have been able to identify the following
- Overpopulation of hospital facilities for diagnostic tests that can be taken at home – one of the biggest challenges in hospitals is the overpopulation in the health care facilities for challenges that could be addressed from home. Some statistics even indicate that 70% of people in the hospital’s outpatient services most of the time do not even need to be there. So there is a huge overpopulation and overworking of the health facilities.
- Acquisition of essential medical diagnostics tools by populations – medical diagnostic tools are very expensive to acquire because they pass through a lot of hands before reaching the final consumer. A report indicated that medical products and devices end up being 7 times more expensive when they reach the consumer, compared to when they were developed. As a result, people may not be able to access simple products like blood pressure and glucometer kits.
- Making primary health care more accessible – primary health care is the system that involves preventive health and early management of health conditions. The health sector is in dire need of innovations to address this since the current systems are designed to treat and not prevent leading to high cases in the facility and which cannot all be managed.
- Attaching more families to medical facilities – most African countries study the Rwandan health system that has managed to connect all families to at least a community health worker, this is one of the biggest industry needs when it comes to the health sector especially as concerns non communicable diseases. Getting people connected directly to medical service providers and facilities so that people get their referrals correctly and efficiently.
LEVEL OF NON-CONSUMPTION
There is currently a very high unmet need for non-communicable diseases in the healthcare system. The current healthcare system has focused most of its attention to addressing communicable diseases like HIV and aids, TB, sexual reproductive health and maternal health. To demonstrate just how large the unmet need is, whilst NCDs account for 6 out of every 10 deaths locally and account for 55% of all hospital admissions, in the health budget NCDs is allocated only 6% of the total health budget.
Most people do not even know that they need to learn about non communicable diseases, and they only get to find out about them when it’s already late or there is a significant impact on their health or family members’ health. As a result, from our field work, this regret is there for over 80% of the people whom we interviewed from the district hospitals who Indicated that they had hoped to get this information earlier.
and so whilst people recognize that they may need to learn about their health earlier on before they get sick with the disease, this unmet need has not been addressed because of a series of significant challenges including price of access to these services, the time lost in hospital facilities due to fragmented care, and the notable lack of access and skills required to assess and address the inadequate awareness, access to early diagnostic services and early case management.
POTENTIAL FOR SECONDARY SUPPORT INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
By introducing a new way to address the challenge of access to personalized NCDs awareness and literacy information and by addressing the challenge of access to diagnostics and early care management, we definitely will lead to a rise of new industries that will come in to support and amplify the work that we will be doing with our solution. This industries are especially in the fields of diagnostic kits access, NCDs data analysis and early case management.