We are excited to announce our second investment of $151,000 in AlemHealth! AlemHealth is a cutting edge telemedicine company that is already transforming lives in the developing world. We hope with our members’ investment they can continue to grown and help many more people.

We spoke to Aschkan Abdul Malek, the CEO of AlemHealth, about his company and WOMENA.

What was the inspiration behind Alem Health?

During my time in Afghanistan and Iraq, many of my local colleagues and employees would regularly travel abroad for all their healthcare needs, spending ruinous amounts of money for what was oftentimes unnecessary had they the right diagnosis before they left. We looked at this problem and thought there had to be a better way to get a proper diagnosis than getting on a plane. A few months later we started working on building a diagnostic telemedicine platform that can work in resource-limited environments, and a year later here we are.

Why is Alem Health important?

We make high quality medical diagnosis accessible globally at a fraction of the cost of medical tourism. Our technology addresses a market segment, developing countries, that has been ignored by large healthcare providers, and provides diagnosis at a global standard. In particular, our work has been instrumental in expanding access to high quality women’s healthcare, with nearly 80% of our current patient population female.

Where is the company now (in terms of impact, customer penetration) and how do you plan to keep this up?

We launched our MVP in January and had our first paying patients by the end of the month. Since then, we’ve grown to 8 hospitals and hundreds of patients diagnosed, and are looking to expand into multiple countries in the coming months. We’re currently rolling out our next iteration of the service, which is built for global scale and will be announced soon. In terms of impact, we’re saving lives through our diagnoses, as our urgent service is regularly used for emergency issues like stroke and trauma cases, and our routine service diagnoses no shortage of cancer cases and serious diseases. The earlier we find those, the faster we can start treating them.

How has your experience with WOMENA been? Have we helped you?

WOMENA has been instrumental to our growth, allowing us to access capital in a region where angel investment is far from established and difficult to source. They have a professional due diligence process, move quickly, and allowed us to get back to what we do best, pushing the boundaries of where high quality healthcare is available. The investment helped us go from an MVP to a polished, scalable product that we could take global.