Kenyan startup Ashacare Medical Solutions is looking to make healthcare provision on the continent more accessible and efficient by providing the infrastructure for better coordinating the healthcare workforce.
Founded in 2018 by medical doctor Mercy Mutahi, Ashacare works to solve operational gaps that affect the quality, efficiency, accountability and accessibility of healthcare. It was launched based on Mutahi’s own experiences in the Kenyan healthcare sector.
“The company was founded from my experience working within healthcare and seeing that many problems that appear to be about infrastructure, systems or access ultimately come back to one critical component – the healthcare workforce,” she told Disrupt Africa.
“A facility can have good infrastructure, equipment and systems, but if the right healthcare professionals are not available, appropriately qualified, properly deployed or accountable for their work, the quality and efficiency of care can still suffer.”
Kenya faces a critical shortage and distribution imbalance in its health workforce, with a needs-based shortfall of roughly 60,000 professionals threatening Universal Health Coverage (UHC) goal, according to Strathmore University.
Ashacare’s flagship technology product is called HealthShift. The platform supports professional and facility verification, workforce matching, recruitment, locum access, team deployment, scheduling, attendance, performance and workforce management.
“HealthShift began as a practical solution for connecting healthcare facilities with verified healthcare professionals when they have staffing needs. It has since evolved into a broader workforce infrastructure designed to connect healthcare professionals, facilities and authorised health-system stakeholders through a common workforce ecosystem,” said Mutahi.
Healthcare workforce information is currently fragmented across individual facilities, informal networks, professional records and different institutional systems. A healthcare professional can work in several facilities, yet their employment and engagement history, availability and other relevant workforce information remain fragmented.
HealthShift is being built to create the coordinating infrastructure through which this information and workforce activity can become more connected, traceable and useful for decision-making. The first version of the platform connected healthcare facilities with healthcare professionals, but Ashacare found the problem was actually much larger than simply finding someone to fill a shift.
“The deeper problem was the absence of a connected workforce layer. That led us to the second evolution of HealthShift: from a staffing marketplace toward healthcare workforce infrastructure,” Mutahi said.
There are already informal staffing networks and healthcare staffing platforms active in the market, but Ashacare believes it is building specifically around the realities of African healthcare systems. HealthShift combines verified healthcare professionals and healthcare facilities; real-time, location-based workforce matching; workforce engagement records; attendance and accountability; ratings and reviews; structured facility requirements; and the foundation for connecting workforce activity with authorised health-system information.
“Our model is therefore not simply “here is a healthcare professional looking for work”, it is “here is a verified professional, here is the verified facility, here is the defined engagement, and here is the information and accountability surrounding that engagement”,” Mutahi said.
Uptake has been very strong indeed. It has over 55 hospitals onboarded, over 1,500 verified healthcare professionals, and has already filled almost 6,000 shifts. Its average time to fill a shift is less than six hours.
“The platform has demonstrated adoption across multiple Kenyan counties, and our hospital portfolio has continued to grow beyond those earlier traction figures,” said Mutahi.
“This matters to us because the validation is not simply that people register. Hospitals return because they have a recurring workforce problem, and professionals return because there are recurring opportunities.”
That creates the foundation for a two-sided network.
“As more facilities participate, more opportunities are created for professionals. As more verified professionals participate, facilities have greater choice and faster fulfillment. That creates the network effect we are building around,” said Mutahi.
HealthShift’s core revenue model combines facility subscriptions and transaction fees, meaning its revenue grows as healthcare workforce activity grows.
“Our financial model is built around increasing facility adoption, shift volume and network density, with a path toward a self-sustaining marketplace,” said Mutahi. “We are already revenue-generating and have demonstrated transaction volume. We are continuing to strengthen the model as we scale.”
That scaling plan was boosted by the startup’s recent participation in the Standard Chartered Foundation’s Women in Tech Accelerator, implemented by Strathmore University’s iBiz Africa, with support from Village Capital. The programme is operated in partnership with Village Capital, which is part of a multi-region initiative which supports impact-creating, tech-enabled, women-led startups in building thriving businesses across Africa, the Middle East, and Pakistan.
“The training challenged us to look critically at the business, particularly around financial management, pitching, strategy and how we understood the market,” said Mutahi.
“The most important lesson was that funding should follow strategy. You should understand where the business is weak, what needs to be built, what needs to be tested and where capital will have the greatest impact before the money arrives.”
Ashacare is now in the process of fundraising to scale its ambition to build trusted healthcare workforce infrastructure for Africa.
“HealthShift starts with a very practical problem – helping healthcare facilities access the right professionals when they need them. But every engagement creates workforce activity. Every verified professional creates a stronger workforce network. Every participating facility adds more context. Every completed engagement creates more operational information,” said Mutahi.
“And as that network grows, the value of the infrastructure grows. That is the opportunity we see. We are not trying to build another isolated healthcare application. We are building the infrastructure that can make healthcare workforce activity more connected, visible, accountable and responsive.”
The startup’s current strategy is to deepen adoption in Kenya, expand into additional healthcare sectors and counties, build stronger relationships with health-system stakeholders, and ultimately take the model into East Africa and other African markets.
“We are therefore building from a real operational need toward a much larger infrastructure opportunity,” said Mutahi.
“Ashacare’s vision is to improve healthcare through better systems. HealthShift is our first major step toward solving one of the most fundamental of those systems: the healthcare workforce.”
Mutahi didn’t set out to become an entrepreneur, but rather to solve a problem she kept seeing.
“Looking back, I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset. Even in medicine, I was constantly asking, “How can this system work better?” Entrepreneurship simply became the vehicle for creating that change at scale,” she said.
“Today, my mission is to build technology that strengthens healthcare systems, improves accountability, and helps deliver better patient care across Africa.”
