Nigerian digital payments company Interswitch has announced the acquisition of eClat Healthcare as it scales up its involvement in the e-health space.
Founded in 2001, Interswitch is focused on the digitisation of payments in Nigeria and other African countries, and also provides technology integration, advisory services, payment infrastructure and transaction processing across multiple channels.
The company has been making a number of strategic investments to enhance its product and service offerings and expand its reach into new markets, and has now acquired a 60 per cent stake in eClat through the purchase of shares from current shareholders and subscription to new shares issued by the company.
Founded in 2012, eClat specialises in assisting healthcare service providers in planning, designing and operating their unique practices through the deployment of its bespoke healthcare technology platform, designed specifically for the healthcare environment in Africa. Its platform has become a leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform, used in over 250 public and private healthcare facilities in Nigeria.
The acquisition of the startup is expected to further enhance Interswitch’s capability to provide comprehensive solutions that involve making payments a seamless part of everyday life across critical social sectors in Africa. The combined product offerings of Interswitch and e-Clat are expected to, amongst other things, enable operators in the healthcare sector to develop new capabilities, improve the efficiency of their core operations, and facilitate seamless payments.
“We are a technology company that is innovating to deliver value across sectors that are critical to Africa’s social and economic development. Our acquisition of eClat demonstrates strong progress along this strategy and alignment with our corporate vision,” Mitchell Elegbe, founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Interswitch said.
Dr. Wallace Ogufere, co-founder and CEO of eClat, said the growing adoption of value-based care, combined with the increasing level of usage of patient portals across the industry, had made it critical to take a new approach to patient engagement solution design in Nigeria.
“We expect to tightly integrate the eClat capabilities into the Interswitch platform, adding functionality that would enable providers to reach their entire patient populations by leveraging existing patient contact information,” he said.
