Ghana’s InstantRad Uses Its Teleradiology Platform To Cut Down Waiting Time For Urgent Scans

There are 80 radiologists serving a population of 32 million people in Ghana. With about 210 million people, Nigeria has less than 300 radiologists. In comparison, some African countries have only one radiologist for every five million people, according to Seth Quansah, Co-founder of InstantRad.

Given this data, Ghanaian startup InstantRad is cutting people's waiting time for urgent scans via an on-demand teleradiology platform that connects hospitals and patients to radiologists.

Seth Quansah and Ernest Appiah launched InstantRad in 2018 to offer a radiology-in-a-box software solution to both hospitals and radiologists. The startup currently has over 100 African radiologists engaged on its platform.

"Now hospitals can demand interpretation of medical images for their patients from radiologists in record time while radiologists have the power to extend their services to as many hospitals as they wish," Quansah told Disrupt Africa.

Quansah says that this issue goes further than just a shortage of radiologists. He mentioned that they identified a poor radiology infrastructure for storing and archiving medical imaging data in most healthcare facilities. Also, there is a demand for an interpolating system because so much information is neglected in various hospitals needed by radiologists to access previous cases for quality reporting.

InstantRad is determined to solve all these problems, and investors have backed it. "We are currently active in Ghana and Nigeria, and we have pipeline arrangements with Ethiopia and Malawi coming up in Q2. We are in the process of scaling up and are currently looking for grants and investment to help us expand from two to ten African countries by the end of 2022," Quansah said.

In September of last year, the startup raised an undisclosed, six-figure amount of pre-seed funding to onboard new talent and expand into new markets and product lines.