PHN, formed to mobilize the broader business and corporate community as well as the private health sector towards a multi-sectoral coalition to improving health outcomes, while making this announcement over the weekend, in Lagos, said at the unveiling of HIC that the initiative is to address suboptimal health care, reduce variability in care and catalyze impact investments in critical segments that benefit the under-served in Nigeria's 160 million people.
Chairman, PHN Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace (MHIM) Steering Committee and Group Managing Director (GMD) of Access Bank, Herbert Wigwe, disclosed that the biggest missed opportunity in accelerating improved Nigeria's health outcomes lies in the ability to create a health innovation marketplace to identify, spur and scale up promising health innovations that leapfrog constraints and save lives.
Wigwe maintained that the private sector has to play an important role in complementing governments' effort to contribute to Save One Million Lives (SOML) through innovation, advocacy and impact investments.
"We (PHN) have convened a community of practice for healthcare innovators in Nigeria. This community will leapfrog innovation through shared learning. There will be learning clusters, spin-offs from this mother group, but we will convene again intermittently, to share not only updates, but also our successes in saving lives. We developed problem statements in partnership with States and government agencies and we are confident that addressing these constraints through innovation and partnerships.
"The NHIM virtual portal has gone live. This is home to the six critical components of the marketplace which by their intrinsic design will spur innovation, whether it is through knowledge sharing, creating visibility for innovators, developing capabilities of innovators, linking innovators with investors, fostering collaboration or generating healthy competition," Wigwe pointed out.
Chief Executive Officer, PHN, Muntaqa Umar-Sadiq, revealed that while Malawi, Uganda and Sierra Leone have developed locally appropriate health technologies and innovations such as Apps, mHealth, etc. to improve health outcomes, health innovations that exist in Nigeria tends to not attain, scale/create sustainable impact due to poor support system for health innovators; they lack access to capital, business and financial management and basic business startup support/incubations needed to take ideas through to market.
"Investors have little visibility on compelling viable health innovations. Investors and health innovators lack convergence platforms that create market and technical linkages. In order to leapfrog existing constraints and spur health innovation through a sustainable convergence platform, PHN created a Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace (MHIM), which is a convergence platform to spur innovation in health for service delivery, provide market linkages, etc.
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