Nigerian startup Doctoora is piloting its “healthcare infrastructure as a service” concept in Lagos ahead of expansion to other Nigerian states and elsewhere in Africa.
Formed in December 2016, Doctoora launched its offering in February of this year, providing a marketplace of fully serviced medical facilities to healthcare professionals on a pay-per-use basis.
Saving healthcare practitioners of various forms from incurring setup costs, the startup provides an online platform that allows them to book facilities, while patients can also find and book healthcare professionals using the platform.
Since its launch, Doctoora has onboarded a significant number of healthcare professionals, and built a network of 15 facilities.
“Nigeria has a massive infrastructure gap, especially in the healthcare sector. This gap has arisen due to low government spending on healthcare, a poor maintenance culture, and the high setup costs associated with healthcare infrastructure,” the startup’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Dr Debo Odulana told Disrupt Africa.
“Due to this, clinicians who earn very little are unable to afford the high setup costs, and thus deterred from setting up their own private practices. Furthermore, existing facilities struggle to generate enough traffic and eventually get buried by overheads.”
Doctoora’s marketplace aims to put an end to all this and provide extra income to both facilities and healthcare practitioners. Having initially been self-funded, it was recently selected to take part in the Co-Creation Hub (CcHub) incubation programme, which will give it access to US$35,000 in funding.
Piloting is well under way, with Odulana saying the startup has its sights on expanding across Nigeria before targeting other African countries. Doctoora takes a commission of the fees paid across the platform, and offers both short and long term rental options.
“Since launch, we have completed 12 short term rental transactions and one long term rental,” said Odulana.
