Interview with Initiative Participants: Team Mobility

Team Mobility is represented by Aris Saxena and Yiwen Li.

Interview conducted by I4A team members Claudia Peng and Chelsea Cao.

I4A: Can you briefly explain your startup? 

Aris: The goal of mobility is to tackle the medical last mile challenge. If you’re not aware of it, there’s a large disparity between health care resources and where patients live. We hope to focus in South Africa initially for patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes, tuberculosis who live 5 to 10km miles away from medical facilities without any means of getting there. It’s often infeasible for these patients to travel large distances to get these medications and then repeat this process every couple of weeks as soon as they need a refill. And because of this, a lot of people don’t take their medications even if the government is willing to provide these medications for free just because of the barriers. That’s what we hope to tackle. Through Mobility, we can provide community health workers with scooters without requiring any upfront payment from them. These would be through microfinance loans. Instead of repaying these loans through the typical method, these health care workers complete deliveries of essential medication from pharmacies to the household level. As they complete deliveries, a proportion of that income goes towards the loan on the vehicle and they get to keep the rest themselves. The idea of Mobility is to provide care directly to underserved patients rather than forcing them to travel to get that care, which is often infeasible.  

Claudia: Gotcha, okay. 

Chelsea: That’s really cool. How did you come up with the concept to do this? 

Yiwen: Aris and I were in a comparative healthcare systems class a couple of semesters ago. We attended the class and it introduced us to the last mile problem. After this, we applied to a Wharton grant and we spent the summer last year interviewing people about the issue. We traveled to South Africa and we met a lot of the people involved in the healthcare supply chain there ranging from pharma companies to insurance companies to logistics. On the government side of things, wholesalers and retailers. We learned a lot about the supply chain and wanted to ask them questions about mobility. They gave us an overwhelmingly positive response so we started to recruit our team and here we are now.  

Claudia: I think you briefly touched on this earlier – who do you plan to impact with your concept?

Aris: The patient population that we are targeting is the population that lives far away from their healthcare facilities. In South Africa, 15% of South Africans live more than 5km away from the closest healthcare facilities. Because these people also live in more rural areas, there is also an issue of a lower income that prevents them from accessing public transportation. Patients can’t really get the healthcare they need and the goal is to provide healthcare directly to them. 

Claudia: Two follow-up questions – Are you specifically targeting people in South Africa and are these scooters electric or just mechanical? 

Yiwen: The Scooters are 150 CP motorcycles so they’re not like the Lime scooters. They are more like mopeds and require gasoline. Although we hope to pilot in South Africa, we hope to scale to other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing countries in the world. 

Chelsea: What was the process like to get your team together? 

Aris: After the summer we had already realized that our idea was feasible and that’s the first thing you want to make sure before furthering the project. We realized we needed a lot of things that we lacked expertise on. Number one, we needed software expertise from programmers. Neither of us are from South Africa and so it’s hard to do logistically and perceptually. It’s always important to have someone who understands the country. We also wanted a website to kind of be able to provide our product and showcase to show to potential customers and also when applying to grants.  We reached out to Penn students. We have a local South African member on our team – his name is Jacob and we found him on Quaker Net. We found that he was interested in similar causes, had a chat, exchanged ideas, and thought he would be a great fit. We also have a  technical cofounder who we reached out to through a listserv for people interested in startups at Penn. He was interested. We found our design lead through mutual connections on the team. Another programmer knew Yiwen from high school so we’re a really diverse set of people. We realize that we need the diverse set of people in order to succeed.  

Claudia: When you were applying to the I4A proposal, how did you adjust your proposal? 

Aris: As soon as COVID-19 hit, we realized that this would impact Mobility in two ways. First, we realized that delivering medications in underdeveloped countries such as south Africa was needed now more than ever, because given COVID and now it’s really difficult to leave the household. People with underlying diseases are already more at risk for COVID. We realized it’s really not safe for these patients to go to healthcare facilities.  Second, even in places like the US, there has been a growing need for services such delivering medication as well as other essential supplies. As soon as we learned more about the situation in Philadelphia, we realized we could help. Through conversations with Penn Med members, we found patients that weren’t able to get groceries. We found this organization called One Extra Bag. We could connect Penn Med students with patients and deliver items. We used our software that we already had to match Penn Med students with patients in order to deliver these essential items. A kind of rejuggling of our initial solution, we used our software to connect the patients with people who could deliver. It’s been operational and the goal is to make an impact on Philadelphia. We can use these lessons to apply them in South Africa.  

Chelsea: Did you have any challenges with adjusting that model to work in Philadelphia? 

Yiwen: I think that the main challenges were adjusting to working with our partners in Philadelphia. It was not easy to work with established organizations and with people we didn’t know. Technologically, we had to develop our technology. We were supposed to finish our prototype by the end of June but we had to push that up. The timeline needed the software to be completed a few weeks earlier.  

Aris: I agree. In a way it felt like we were starting from square one. Partnerships are really important and you can’t be a sole entity with a solution – you need people who want to help you implement it. You need to find people and an existing need. Once you have the connections, it’s easier to get advice and customize our solution for their challenge.  

Claudia: Speaking of partnerships, what was the motivation to apply for I4A? Was it to gain expertise?

Yiwen: We wanted to gain partnerships, but we also wanted funding for our pilot studies. Our immediate goal is to get Mobility off the ground in South Africa. We thought I4A was an opportunity for us. It was a good competition in terms of healthcare and it met with a lot of the mission and what we wanted to do in the future. It aligned with our values and our mission.  

Claudia: As a follow-up question: what sort of expertise is missing? 

Aris: The expertise and learning never stops. It’s hard for us to be full time students and work on our solution at the same time. It’s hard to implement something in a country we’re not familiar with. Between our time, we can talk about our solution all we want. What matters is if people there actually see value in Mobility and if our solution fits into that challenge. Because of that, getting the healthcare expertise of people who actually live in South Africa could help.  

Chelsea: What other ways have I4A helped you mold your idea and helped you pivot towards your goals and other things you want to accomplish? 

Yiwen: We were working with Pallavi for the past two weeks. We reached out to Dr. Petkoski and he was organizing an initiative to tackle health patients in Africa. We thought that that was an opportunity to make a great impact.  

Claudia: I think those are all the questions we have for now. 

Chelsea: Is there anything else you want to add to the interview that we haven’t talked about? 

Aris: I don’t think so.  

Claudia: Thanks for talking with us. Bye!