CDMS - A Comprehensive Healthcare Information System in the Cloud
Built In Kenya speaks to CDMS co-founder Kingangi Gitau
Good morning,
Healthcare is near and dear to most of us. When you visit a hospital, you not only expect competent healthcare professionals, but competent and efficient systems too.
Today’s startup founder is helping make these systems more efficient while tackling a major challenge in the healthcare industry - data sharing.
Welcome to the latest edition of Built In Kenya, a weekly newsletter that profiles Kenyan tech founders, highlighting their startup journey, products/services, and helping them reach a wider audience.
In today’s edition, I speak with Clinical Data Management Systems (CDMS) co-founder Kingangi Gitau and discuss the role his startup is playing to move healthcare data systems to the cloud and make the health industry more efficient.
Let’s jump in.
Regards,
Founder, Built In Kenya
About CDMS
Clinical Data Management Solutions is an integrated data management solution that can be adopted to run all daily operations in modern healthcare facilities. It is a cloud-based web application that can be easily accessed from anywhere by any device with a working Internet browser.
Built by: Kingangi Gitau & Nelson Ameyo
Year founded: 2020
Website: https://cdms.co.ke/
Funding: Self
Contacts: Twitter @jongitau, @_cdms
Interview with Kingangi Gitau, CDMS co-founder
Built In Kenya: Let's start with the startup's founder. Could you tell us about your professional background and why you became a startup founder?
Kingangi Gitau: I did mathematics in university and followed up with some database admin and management courses. I've worked in the healthcare industry for quite a while, doing a little development and support and a lot of data work.
One of the reasons I started CDMS is to create a healthcare data management system that covers the entire healthcare sector. One of the places I worked was in HIV management, and the systems they were using came from international NGOs and focused only on HIV management.
When it came to HIV patients, their data was well managed, but for other patients, it was all over the place and poorly organized. We started CDMS to organize patient data for the rest of the patients.
Built In Kenya: You saw a gap in the market that you felt you could fill.
Kingangi Gitau: Exactly.
Built In Kenya: Besides seeing a gap in the market, what has inspired you to become a problem solver?
Kingangi Gitau: I would say problem-solving comes naturally to me. I remember working at a job, and I noticed the company was slowing down and they were planning to downsize. I boldly asked my bosses to allow me to work three days a week at reduced pay as a workaround. I used the other two days of the week to do additional work and complement my income.
Built In Kenya: Are you saying startup founders are born and not made?
Kingangi Gitau: I think circumstances can also push someone in that direction.
Built In Kenya: Okay. Could you give us a brief overview of CDMS?
Kingangi Gitau: CDMS is a hospital management software for health records management (HRM) or electronic medical records (EMR).
You may have noticed that most hospitals digitized their systems. You walk in, the receptionist records your details, and the triage nurse records your pressure, BMI, height, weight, and all that digitally.
Our system captures this whole process in the hospital while providing ease of use to the hospital or clinic workers. CDMS also supports industry-standard reporting, which is very important for facilities worldwide.
Built In Kenya: What specific challenges or problems does CDMS solve?
Kingangi Gitau: Primarily data collection. For example, it supports pharmacy inventory management while enabling financial management. As a facility owner, you want to keep track of everything happening, including transactions, staff workload, and patient intake.
This visibility helps speed up pharmacy, lab, reception, and doctor processes, leading to better service delivery.
Built In Kenya: What makes CDMS stand out from what's already in the market?
Kingangi Gitau: Its ease of use, affordability, and reporting make it stand out. I noticed these are the main gaps in some facilities.
Built In Kenya: Are you pre-revenue or post-revenue currently?
Kingangi Gitau: We spent 2020 developing and now have some clients. We are also actively conducting sales to bring on more clients.
Built In Kenya: What's the biggest challenge you face from a business perspective?
Kingangi Gitau: Marketing is our biggest challenge. The product is working, and we have a handful of clients already, but reaching out to the market is the challenge we are experiencing right now.
Built In Kenya: What could help you overcome this challenge?
Kingangi Gitau: Forums like this and others where we can meet facility owners and decision makers of those facilities. Funding to get a sales team on the ground and doing cold calling would also really help.
Built In Kenya: I've spoken to a few other founders, and marketing is a common challenge. Most have a ready product, but that market access is lacking.
Where do you want to see CMS in the next five years despite these challenges?
Kingangi Gitau: We want to be the market leader of electronic medical records in East Africa before going worldwide.
Built In Kenya: Do you see CDMS servicing big hospitals and their satellite clinics?
Kingangi Gitau: Yes. CDMS has a modular architecture supporting other functions like patient insurance billing. We can also add features upon request.
Built In Kenya: Who is your target market? Your ideal customer?
Kingangi Gitau: Let me give you an example. Aga Khan has satellite clinics nationwide, which we can accommodate because we have branch management in our system. We are looking for hospitals and clinics with a single outlet or multiple facilities countrywide.
Built In Kenya: Let's shift gears a bit and talk about the healthcare industry in Kenya. What are the specific challenges and opportunities you see regarding EMR data in Kenya?
Kingangi Gitau: I hope we can achieve interoperability in the healthcare industry through data sharing. We are not yet there. Imagine a scenario where you have a recurring condition and visit a hospital in Kisumu. Then, you find yourself in another town, maybe Kiambu or Machakos, a few weeks later.
I envision a situation where data can be shared quickly and seamlessly, including your patient history, records, and all your health records, resulting in better service. That's the opportunity I see and a challenge at the same time.
Built In Kenya: The Kenyan tech startup industry - give me your thoughts and impression of it.
Kingangi Gitau: As a country, we are heading in the right direction, but we need to meet and network to exchange ideas and learn from each other. There's also a great need for funding. If the industry can create more opportunities for these two aspects, that can be a big plus. We also need more buy-in from the government.
Built In Kenya: What is one thing that would accelerate the growth of startups in Kenya?
Kingangi Gitau: The ability to reach out to the market and gain more visible visibility would significantly affect the success of startups in Kenya.
Built In Kenya: So, if you had greater access to an audience, would that be helpful to your startup?
Kingangi Gitau: Absolutely. That's the one thing that's holding us back.
Built In Kenya: I started this newsletter mainly to give startups like yours access to a greater audience and hopefully help you get more customers, users, and possibly investors.
What mistake did you make as a founder that you'd like to share with the readers?
Kingangi Gitau: I took it for granted that I have a niche product and that it will work on its own. Once we completed the dev part, we found this monster called marketing, which we started tackling a bit too late.
Built In Kenya: What advice would you give a budding founder with a brilliant idea?
Kingangi Gitau: Ideas should start from the demand side. You can have a brilliant idea, but there might not be enough demand for it.
When putting together an idea, concentrate on the demand side, especially your target market. Try to do some surveys or talk to them and learn more about what they need before building something.
Understand your market correctly and have a plan of how you're going to get to this market. You could have a good idea that's needed to some extent, but if you don't have a plan of how you will reach this market, you will have a problem.
Built In Kenya: What keeps you going? I know there's this huge mountain of market access and marketing, but what keeps you grinding on?
Kingangi Gitau: Mostly our existing clients. I must get up every day to support them and provide good service. That motivates me. Also, the idea that CDMS can grow exponentially with low overheads in a very short time is what keeps me going.
Built In Kenya: Are you currently looking for funding?
Kingangi Gitau: Yes, we are. Primarily to invest in marketing and sales.
Built In Kenya: We used to have an innovation fund in Kenya. Is that something you see has potential in Kenya, and how would you see it working?
Kingangi Gitau: It does have potential. However, recipients need to be more educated on how to position their startup and manage that money to get the best out of it.
Built In Kenya: Okay, great. It's now time for the elevator pitch. You have sixty seconds to sell your startup, starting now.
Kingangi Gitau: Clinical Data Management Solutions is a product developed by IBA (Internet Business Applications).
We believe healthcare is an information business and that the data collected by clinicians and the process of choosing treatments is based on the history of the patient and findings from physical examinations. CDMS aims to make medical records available when you need them.
Medical records are gathered from all corners of the industry. With a system like ours, you can harness the incredible power of that data more accurately, securely, and faster than before.
With CDMS, you can leverage modern-day reporting and analytics to assist you in adopting a more patient outcome-focused approach and strategy by using relevant data that our system collects.
Using CDMS will help you run your facility better and achieve the best possible revenues while delivering top-notch patient care.
Built In Kenya: Awesome. Thank you for speaking to Built In Kenya. The whole intention of this newsletter is to tell stories like yours and gain your startup more visibility.
As a founder, I know the challenge of getting visibility. Hopefully, with the visibility you get here, you and other founders might have a better chance of succeeding.
Written and edited by Dan Mbure
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