When more businesses were forced to close shop because of the devastation caused by Covid-19, one company started operating during the hard national lockdown, offering an at-home medical services.
And with Covid-19 and a shortage of beds in hospitals in areas like Nelson Mandela Bay — a coronavirus hotspot in SA — the introduction of tech-driven company, Quro Medical co-founded by Eastern Cape’s Zikho Pali, 28 — proved to be a fitting intervention.
The company provides health services to patients in the comfort of their homes. This includes 24-hour remote monitoring of patients’ conditions and provision of medical assistance through the use of technology.
With the Bay battling a bed and health-care workers shortage crisis at the peak of the pandemic, Quro Medical has, through its Covid-19 remote monitoring solution, catered for patients without a dire need for conventional hospital beds thus providing relief to overwhelmed hospital staff.
Mthatha-born Pali, who co-founded the company with CEO Vuyane Mhlomi and chief scientific officer Rob Cornish while pursuing her LLM studies at Harvard School of Law in the US in 2018, said the aim was to provide cost effective, quality health care to patients at home.
“In more developed jurisdictions like Australia and the US there have been studies where science has demonstrated that patients generally do better at home.
“There is overwhelming evidence of many positive outcomes when patients are being treated in the comfort of their homes.
“Costs aside, the hospi-centric model comes with various complications, including hospital-acquired infections — patients go in with one [illness] and leave with another,” Pali said.
The hospital-at-home model is an alternative to a general hospital medical ward and provides care to acutely ill patients through tech and medical professionals.
Pali said they preferred for patients to be referred to them by medical professionals.
She said Quro Medical’s in-house medical professionals worked closely with the referring practitioner to provide care for the patient.
“The patient’s referring GP or physician continues to provide oversight alongside our in-house clinical team.
“We dispatch a health-care provider to visit the patient’s home for the first three days while we monitor [the patient’s] vital signs through our technology, after three days when we see that a patient can be remotely monitored, we no longer physically dispatch staff to their homes,” she said.
Though established in 2018, the company was not operational until July 2020, at the peak of the pandemic.
Pali said they have been working closely with private hospital groups, providing care to Covid-19 patients from home.
This includes remote monitoring of vital signs including heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature and oxygen saturation.
“We spent the bulk of the first two years building this model and only intended to launch later this year but Covid-19 forced us to launch early.
“We felt we had a moral imperative to accelerate our launch because of the capabilities we have with our technology to help lift the strain on our health system,” Pali said.
Quro Medical at present provides care in about 60 homes across the country, she said.
They have 15 permanently employed staff and 79 doctors on their database who have provided health care to patients in Port Elizabeth, East London, Johannesburg and Bloemfontein and Cape Town.
“Our model has been embraced by private hospitals particularly in Port Elizabeth and our working arrangement has been that we try and decompress the busiest hospitals by managing a sub-state of acutely ill patients in their homes and try to improve [the hospitals’] own monitoring abilities,” she said.
Hailing from a country whose population majority is dependent on the public health care’s severely stretched resources motivated Pali to pursue a solution to SA’s health-care crisis.
HeraldLIVE
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