CarePay gives everyone the power to care. Our shareholders – a combination of for-profit and non-profit organizations – are committed to supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), especially SDG 3: to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for people of every age.
The CarePay platform was built to improve access to healthcare for everyone, connecting people, providers and payers (individuals, companies, insurers, governments and donors) in the healthcare financing value chain.
We have already signed up millions of people Africa, giving them access to care they may otherwise have been without.
Ensuring long-term success
To best serve the needs of these customers, we have taken the decision to keep the source code of the CarePay platform proprietary. This means that CarePay owns this intellectual property and will not release the majority of the code publicly for others to use.
We understand there can be benefits to providing open-source technology in the healthcare market – we ourselves work closely with several open-source initiatives in Africa - but we believe proprietary ownership is the best way to ensure the long-term term sustainability of CarePay’s impact to various stakeholders.
Being closed source means we don’t depend on short-term funding from external sources. This allows us to pursue long-term objectives and to make a bigger positive impact for the people we are trying to help.
Why are we taking this decision?
To work effectively, the CarePay platform needs to connect thousands of healthcare providers, millions of users and key public and private healthcare payers one platform.
While open-source software performs well for independent, isolated systems (such as HMIS, Linux and TensorFlow), platforms like CarePay need a significant and ongoing investment in developers to create, run and maintain the platform.
And just as Uber and AirBnB need to connect millions of transacting parties instantly and at low cost to the end user, the CarePay platform needs to connect payers, providers and individuals at a giant scale and a marginal cost.
Making the most of our data
By connecting patients, doctors and payers the CarePay platform generates valuable data and information about healthcare transactions and we believe this data is ultimately more valuable than the software itself.
Data is captured, stored and shared in ways that conform to GDPR standards. This means that we give individual platform users full control of their health and financial data.
We share anonymized data with stakeholders to improve the quality of, and access to, healthcare in the countries we operate in. By sharing data within a wider healthcare eco-system - in line with key data protection and ownership principles – we help to unlock real value in the healthcare market and transform the lives of millions of people around the world.
At CarePay, we endorse and actively implement open standards for the exchange of healthcare information. Our platform uses and continuously evaluates standards such as FHIR, openHIE, ICD10, ICHI and ACT to ensure we remain part of the wider healthcare ecosystem.
