Healthtech in Nairobi: Building Where the NHS Never Reached

Host: You started MedLink in 2019, before COVID made telemedicine mainstream everywhere. What was the original insight?

Dr. Kamau: The insight was geographic, not technological. Kenya has roughly one doctor for every 5,000 people. The national average hides the distribution — in Nairobi you might have something like European ratios; in Turkana County in the north-west, you might have one doctor per 50,000 people. Telemedicine didn't feel like a technology play to me. It felt like the only rational response to geography.

Host: How did you get patients to trust a screen?

Dr. Kamau: We didn't start with the screen. We started with community health workers — people already trusted in villages — and gave them tablets and training. The first consultation was between a familiar face and a doctor on a screen, not between a patient and a stranger on a screen. The community health worker was the bridge. That's still how 60% of our consultations are initiated.

Host: What surprised you about building a healthtech company in Kenya versus, say, the US?

Dr. Kamau: Regulation is actually easier in some ways. The regulatory framework is newer and hasn't calcified around the assumption that all medicine happens in a building. In the US or the UK, you're fighting 70 years of regulations designed for physical clinics. In Kenya, we had more room to define what telemedicine is.