School of Public Health student Samuel Amoako-Kusi earned second place in the social impact track of Innovate@BU‘s 2026 New Venture Competition for his startup JoHil eKlinics. The venture uses a hybrid telemedicine model to deliver specialist care for chronic diseases to underserved rural areas in Ghana.
Amoako-Kusi pitched the venture during the competition’s grand finale at BU Innovator’s Night on March 14, where a panel of judges awarded him $10,000 to support the continued operation and expansion of the startup.
A dental surgeon in Ghana before coming to Boston in August 2025 to study healthcare management at SPH, Amoako-Kusi founded JoHil’s first clinic in 2021 after earning a master’s in business analytics. While overseeing the peri-urban primary care clinic, he realized that many patients with chronic conditions, such as hypertension and diabetes, were not following up with the specialists the clinic referred them to.
“We refer them to specialists in cities, and they don’t go because of long distances—it’s six hours travel—and the cost is enormous,” says Amoako-Kusi. “Then, they come back to the emergency room in crisis. They are deferring treatment and not getting better, so I thought, how can we solve this problem?”
Because the majority of Ghana’s medical specialists are concentrated in urban areas, rural patients must travel many hours at great expense to be seen. Instead, Amoako-Kusi observed, many patients forgo treatment entirely. The necessary solution, he decided, was a digital bridge. He partnered with a friend to create eDok Technologies, a telemedicine application that connects patients with doctors virtually.
“Then, we realized we could adapt the concept for the clinic,” says Amoako-Kusi. “So now, we have repurposed it for the rural clinic, and so patients who have to see an endocrinologist—an internal medicine specialist—they don’t have to travel. They come [to the clinic], we take their vitals because there’s a nurse, there’s a lab, so we take their vitals, we prep them, then through the app, we call the doctors in the cities and they consult with them. So, they can now come for reviews every week [and] they can come for drug refills.”
In the 13 months since Amoako-Kusi implemented eDok Technologies, he has witnessed an incredible transformation. Since JoHil eKlinics began operating under this hybrid model, Amoako-Kusi says the clinic has experienced a 40% increase in patients following through with care.
By providing consistent monitoring of patients with chronic conditions, he estimates the clinic may have prevented 40 strokes and slashed the average number of annual ER visits from 2.1 to 0.8. For a population where healthcare costs can reach $2,000 annually, the venture’s ability to reduce that burden to $500 represents a potential $37.5 million in savings returned to the pockets of the 25,000 patients they serve, he says.
“You realize that such a small innovation has changed their lives […] Families could have experienced death and that has been avoided,” says Amoako-Kusi. “It inspires me that rethinking systems is a must because people’s lives depend on it.”
Looking ahead, Amoako-Kusi aims to open a second clinic and hopes to extend his studies at BU beyond an MPH.
“I’m hoping to get a PhD—probably at BU, maybe in health services research—and try to bridge the gap between practice and academia,” he says. “Because I’m in the field of practice, so if I get a PhD in academia, then I’ll be able to bridge that gap and translate the research we do onto the ground.”
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