Benin: Vèna Arielle Ahouansou or innovation at the service of healthcare

Vèna Arielle Ahouansou is a young doctor and entrepreneur from Benin. In 2017, she created Kea Medicals, a universal medical identification (IMU) system that allows doctors in Africa to easily access the medical history of their patients.

At 27, Vèna Arielle Ahouansou is an ambitious doctor with an atypical background.After her training, she chose to focus on entrepreneurship rather than working in hospitals and clinics.

It was during her 6th year of medical training that she decided to turn to entrepreneurship. One evening, while she was on call, she received a young woman who had just given birth to twins. The young woman had hemorrhaged and needed a blood transfusion to stay alive. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get her blood type, even though she was tested earlier. She finally died a few minutes later while new tests were done to administer the blood transfusion. An experience that Arielle is not about to forget and that convinced her that she would not be able to save lives by working as a doctor. In 2017, just after her degree, she launched Kea Medicals Pharmaceuticals & Technologies, a universal medical identification system that provides a centralized database for quick access to patient medical data on demand. 

Record the medical history of patients 

Kea Medicals is a platform for securely cataloging patient medical history. Through a software, it enables all the care processes in a hospital to be digitized. On the platform, patients have the possibility to create their universal medical identification (IMU) account, by entering information such as identity, allergies, blood grouping, chronic diseases, the number of a relative to warn in case of emergency. After registration, each patient receives an IMU Code in the form of a QR code that the company prints on various media such as: bracelets, cards with their name and emergency number and they sell for less than 5 euros.

By scanning the QR code, the physician can access the patient’s entire medical history regardless of origin and geographic location. The solution makes it easier to trace patients’ medical information, avoids data loss, reduces healthcare costs by avoiding redoing analyses already performed, etc. It is accessible free of charge for patients and is paid for hospitals and clinics. It currently has more than 7,000 active users.

The young entrepreneur aims to extend the platform to all of Africa and to interconnect the IMU code with a health insurance, since today, the majority of Africans do not have health insurance.

Thanks to her start-up, Vèna Arielle Ahouansou has won several awards, including the 2019 Grand Prix for Innovation organized by the city of Paris.