Instead of building just another telemedicine platform, Ghanaian startup BawaHealth is hospital-enabled, enabling existing, trusted institutions to extend their care digitally under their own brands.
Founded last year, BawaHealth provides hospitals with secure digital infrastructure for telemedicine and continuity of care, giving hospitals a digital front door rather than replacing them with a tech company.
“We are the operating system for hospital-led telemedicine,” founder and CEO Nafieu Bawa said.
Africa has a doctor shortage, with roughly 300,000 doctors serving 1.4 billion people – about three doctors per 10,000 population.
“You cannot train your way out of that gap fast enough. But you can multiply every doctor’s impact by giving hospitals the infrastructure to extend care beyond their walls,” Bawa said. “That is what we do.”
For hospitals, the BawaHealth platform makes clinician availability visible in real time, enables digital outpatient clinics and follow-up consultations, manages chronic disease pathways and post-discharge care, and recovers revenue lost to no-shows and invisible capacity.
“We call the underlying gap the “invisible doctor problem” – no hospital in Africa can tell you which specialist is free right now. We fix that,” said Bawa.
For patients, BawaHealth solves a different but equally critical problem – most Africans do not know where or when to find the right specialist.
“Our platform lets patients discover doctors by location, expertise, and real-time availability, and book in-person appointments with their preferred clinician instead of waiting hours in a queue,” said Bawa.
“We do not deliver clinical care. All medical responsibility stays with licensed hospitals and their clinicians. We provide the infrastructure layer.”
Bawa has served on the board of a hospital since 2018, giving him direct exposure to the operational challenges hospitals face.
“Most health-tech startups in Africa build for patients, bypassing hospitals entirely. We identified that the real bottleneck is hospital operations, not patient access alone,” he said.
“Hospitals already have patient trust, clinical staff, and regulatory standing. What they lack is digital infrastructure to extend their reach beyond physical walls and make their clinicians visible to patients who need them.”
So while competitors like Teladoc Health, and regional players such as mPharma and Helium Health, focus on direct-to-consumer telemedicine or hospital management, BawaHealth is rather building the operational layer that makes hospital-led telemedicine work.
“Real-time clinician visibility, patient-side doctor discovery, digital outpatient workflows, and continuity-of-care pathways, all while keeping the hospital at the centre,” said Bawa. “We strengthen hospitals instead of competing with them.”
The startup has established hospital pilot partnerships in Accra, and has a 24-hour deployment capability, with no new hardware required.
“Early uptake has been encouraging. Pilot hospitals have validated the core value proposition – making clinician availability visible and improving no-show rates by 30 to 40 per cent,” said Bawa.
“Hospital administrators consistently report the same insight – they did not realise how much revenue they were losing to invisible capacity until we showed them the data. We are seeing strong pull from hospital networks that want to digitise outpatient and follow-up services without building their own technology stack.”
BawaHealth is now targeting a raise of between US$800,000 and US$1.5 million to fund its first 18 months of scaling across Ghana, and into Nigeria and Kenya.
“The platform is market-agnostic. Our deployment model, cloud-native with no hardware and 24-hour go-live, means we can enter new markets rapidly once the operational playbook is proven,” said Bawa.
The startup has a hybrid revenue model. Hospitals pay a subscription fee of between US$200 to US$500 per month to use the platform, while it also charges a fee per virtual consultation facilitated. It will also introduce premium modules, such as chronic disease management, analytics dashboards, and multi-site coordination.
“We are pre-revenue at scale, focused on proving the deployment model and unit economics through our pilot programme. Break-even per hospital is achieved at approximately 50 to 75 virtual consultations per month, a target well within reach for any active hospital,” said Bawa.
“Our unit economics are strong because we are not acquiring patients; we are digitising existing patient relationships.”
