Durban – Next week a Mancosa alumni and his company will be flying to Harvard University to participate in the Africa Business Conference 2023 after winning an entrepreneurship competition.
Rorschach Innovation Services, a company headed up by Mancosa alumni Niall Naidoo, won the pan-African Honoris at Harvard Entrepreneurship Competition. Naidoo will leave for the US on March 22.
The competition was part of the conference’s jubilee anniversary celebrations and was designed to help celebrate the Honoris mission to encourage innovation in entrepreneurship in Africa.
Today, the Africa Business Conference is the largest student-led conference from Harvard Business School and is one of the milestones in the calendars of global development and education specialists with a focus on Africa. The conference welcomes business leaders, academics, students and NGOs.
Naidoo will have the opportunity to network with students, alumni, funders, and potential partners to further his ventures.
Naidoo had a BSc in dietetics and was looking for a business qualification to add value to this degree and facilitate his development as an entrepreneur in the dietetics space. He enrolled at Mancosa where he obtained an MBA specialising in health care.
The MBA curriculum allowed Naidoo to build his team and facilitated the development of the innovative products that will be displayed at Harvard.
Their first product is a technology that aims to predict injuries in elite athletes.
“Sport is a major business worldwide and there are massive financial implications for both teams, and their owners when elite athletes are sidelined through injury. Our product assesses athletes and their workloads. The product will then predict the likelihood of the athlete picking up an injury. This will help teams responsibly manage their athletes, increasing their return on investment,” Naidoo said.
This approach also helped to prolong the career of elite athletes so that they could compete at the highest level for the longest time possible, he said.
The second product that Rorschach Innovation Services is developing is a patient management system that aims to modernise the health-care industry. Naidoo said the system was designed to facilitate remote clinical assessments and health-care management, making it easier for doctors to treat patients regardless of their location. By digitising clinical notes and implementing advanced screening processes, this technology would provide doctors with real-time access to patient data, allowing for more efficient and accurate diagnoses.
This system had the potential to significantly reduce waiting times for patients in rural areas where access to health care was limited, he said. By streamlining the patient management process, doctors could focus more on delivering quality care and improving patient outcomes. The digitalisation of clinical notes and screening aligned to the African health-care system allowed for a cost-effective solution for the health-care industry, enabling access to quality care for patients.
“The primary reason I went to Mancosa was their specialisation in health care and their focus on access. The frameworks and curriculum learned at Mancosa set the foundations for developing and hopefully rolling out this clinical platform designed to circumvent these issues,” Naidoo said.
Then the third product Rorschach Innovation Services has developed relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning to track the brand exposure of sponsors at sporting events in an attempt to better quantify their return on investment. This technology has applications across companies looking to understand their return on investment when it comes to marketing.
“Getting an opportunity to go to Harvard University – which consistently places in the top 10 universities in the world – will be a massive and life-changing experience for me. It shows that South Africa is still a global leader in terms of research and innovation. Furthermore, it validates our products as globally competitive. Hopefully, we can secure funding to take these products to the next level,” Naidoo said.
From a young age, Naidoo was enthusiastic about health care and the need to provide world-class health-care systems to developing countries.
He enrolled at Mancosa in 2015. In his final year, Naidoo’s MBA assignment was on telemedicine and social impact. He said this was the first time he was introduced to the concept.
The social impact of telemedicine and the digitalisation of medical services is vast as it offers a more convenient, cost-effective, and efficient way to deliver quality care to patients worldwide.
Naidoo said Rorschach Innovation Services was developing innovative tools that would allow clinicians to quickly access a patient's medical history, reducing consultation time and making telemedicine more accessible.
WhatsApp your views on this story at 071 485 7995.
Daily News