Beamlak Alemayehu, a nurse by training who works professionally as a social worker, founded Medanit Ethiopia. The venture is an online health service designed to speed up patients' route to medicines, tests and doctors, in a country where waiting can be fatal. Since it began in 2022, Medanit has signed up more than 520 physicians and attracted 1.2 million users to its platform. The Bayer Foundation is also behind it, and the company intends to branch out into Rwanda and Zambia.
Picture a hospital emergency unit where finding a patient's prescribed drug takes three hours: that goes well beyond mere inconvenience, and it can cost someone their life. Alemayehu saw precisely this in 2020 while employed in a public emergency room in Ethiopia, where patients lost critical hours going from one pharmacy to another, hunting for the vital medicines and diagnostic tests they needed. Some died before they could obtain them.
She first imagined Medanit as a neat online directory. After visiting clinics and pharmacies, though, she ran into a problem: around 80% to 90% of them still operated wholly on handwritten paper ledgers, so there was no digital data to connect to. She concluded that acting only as a go-between for patients and providers would not do, and tackled the difficult groundwork herself. She developed hospital management software, created digital patient files (EMR), organised delivery logistics for pharmacies, and established Medanit's own call centre so that farmers and mothers in rural areas who lack smartphones could still be reached. In this report, JOHN ADOYI describes how an Ethiopian nurse chose to construct the healthcare infrastructure herself rather than wait for it to appear.
Why a nurse founded Medanit Ethiopia
When it comes to health care, each minute counts. Beamlak Alemayehu, a social worker as well as a nurse by training, saw this first-hand during seven months in the A&E unit of a state-run hospital in Ethiopia in 2020. Patients might spend hours hunting for the drugs, scans and lab work, or specialist attention they needed.
Alemayehu says she watched patients rush between pharmacies and hospitals, frequently losing three to four hours tracking down the drugs they had been prescribed. Some waited for days before locating the right specialist. Doctors, meanwhile, had to wait for drugs or lab findings before they could settle on how to treat patients. According to Alemayehu, some patients died because of these shortcomings.
“Every minute has a value for the patient and for the physicians. Most of the cases that we treat are life or death issues,” she said.
The experience led her to ask why patients should have to push through such a broken system merely to reach care. What was needed, she felt, was a simple way to see which doctors were available, find where medication was in stock, and spot the facilities that provide the relevant diagnostic services.
Out of that experience, Alemayehu went on in 2022 to found Medanit, a platform for digital health aiming to broaden access to medical care in Ethiopia. It began as a basic directory of medical providers, but now also offers doctor bookings, telemedicine, medicine delivery to the home, and digital tools that help health facilities manage their daily operations.
Alemayehu says Medanit has 527 doctors registered with it, and since January 2026 consultations across its platforms have reached 1.2 million. She has also been chosen for the Bayer Foundation's funding programme for female founders, which provides mentoring and support in developing the company, the aim being for Medanit to expand and reach a greater number of people.
The access problem goes beyond locating a doctor
Distance is one of the obstacles to healthcare in Ethiopia. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Global Health put the share of people living more than two hours' walk from a government-run health centre at about 18%, with large differences between regions. Its numbers were based on 2020 estimates of the population and on facility locations as of December 2021.
Even those who manage to reach a facility can face a lengthy wait. In the People's Voice Survey conducted by the Public Health Institute of Ethiopia, 49% of respondents said that at their latest appointment they sat for over sixty minutes before seeing a provider. Among those living in the countryside, the share climbed to 55%.
But linking patients with care created another problem for Alemayehu: many clinics and hospitals did not always keep the tidy, structured records that her platform needed.
Alemayehu began recruiting partners among medical centres, health posts and drug retailers, expecting to draw their electronic files and inventory figures directly into Medanit. She ran into a barrier: in her account, around 80–90% of the providers she contacted were still working with paper-based systems.
“We were planning to launch it after we developed our platform,” she said. “All we thought was we would get the data from our partners, and then we would launch our product.”
Her struggle is symptomatic of a broader issue with moving health services online. A 2023 pooled analysis of five studies in Ethiopia, covering a combined 2,439 clinicians, found that 51.85% of them used electronic medical records.
According to the researchers, adoption was linked to training, the availability of user manuals and backing from management.
For Alemayehu, the consequences were immediately clear. A directory could assist patients in choosing a place to go, but connecting them with the physicians, drugs and diagnostic testing that were genuinely on offer relied on reliable data supplied by the providers.
“We cannot digitalise or create easier access to care just from a patient perspective or becoming a middleman,” she said.
Consequently, Medanit shifted away from the directory approach it began with and started developing software for running hospitals, digital patient files and tools for handling pharmacy stock.
Today the company's aim is twofold: guiding patients to healthcare services, and helping facilities structure the information they need, so those services can be reached.
What Medanit Ethiopia offers patients and doctors
Medanit gives patients much more than a means of finding doctors. Whether they go through its website, its smartphone app, its Telegram channel or a phone helpline, people can book appointments, find out where prescribed drugs are in stock, organise diagnostic tests and hold remote consultations with doctors.
These varied routes exist so that patients with differing degrees of technological exposure can all be served.
Alemayehu explained that patients may photograph a prescription, or simply type in what a medicine is called, to find out which outlets have it, and the platform can then arrange for it to be delivered.
People who require diagnostic tests can look up facilities that carry out the relevant investigations and book a slot, and those wanting medical advice can speak to doctors over video calls.
“You can book a doctor, you can take a picture of your prescription and upload it and see where you can find it, and we deliver that medication to you as well,” Alemayehu said.
“The call centre is mainly intended to provide these services for those who do not have access to a smartphone or the internet,” she said, naming farmers and mothers in rural areas among those the helpline is meant to serve.
Among the doctors Medanit works with, some hold consultations in specialisms including child health, heart care, skin conditions and women's health. Alemayehu added that the firm also has its own salaried doctors, who assist in arranging appointments and consultations and in getting medication delivered. She said patients can also receive online counselling from mental health practitioners through Medanit Counselling.
Separate accounts are provided for doctors, who use them to handle their appointment calendars and get in touch with patients. Yet the platform does more than enable those exchanges. Medanit has also built hospital management software, digital patient files and tools for controlling pharmacy stock, all aimed at helping healthcare facilities keep their operations in order.
According to Alemayehu, the company moved in this direction after finding that numerous facilities had none of the digital records or stock-tracking systems she had assumed would be available to link up with the original directory.
Medanit therefore started working alongside providers to move their operations onto digital systems, having concluded that connecting people who are ill with treatment also relied on facilities holding well-ordered information about what they offered and what resources they had.
Making healthcare easier to reach as a business
Medanit's business model covers both ends of how healthcare is delivered. The company's income comes from:
- medication delivery fees;
- a commission on doctors' appointments;
- consultations with doctors by video or call, billed by the minute;
- counselling sessions.
Medanit also provides healthcare facilities with digital tools, including EMR (electronic patient files), inventory control and software for running hospitals.
However, pooling several fixes for healthcare gaps into one platform has not eased the company's expansion. Alemayehu said that uptake of online health offerings has so far been low and that revenue is still modest, and both factors have slowed Medanit's growth.
“Obviously, funding has been one of the constraints that we face because it’s a very sensitive sector that we are operating in. It grows within a very limited amount of revenue,” she said.
In her view, the difficulty goes beyond building technology that functions. Medanit also has to put in place the physical operations needed to deliver what it offers, above all getting medication to people.
In practice, this involves obtaining supplies of medicines, setting up a dependable supply chain, and working out the logistics for reaching patients who would otherwise find it hard to obtain drugs.
“Creating an optimised logistics pathway for the medication delivery path has been our bottleneck because of funding issues,” Alemayehu said.
Regulation has added further uncertainty. Alemayehu noted that when Medanit started out, there was no well-defined policy framework for digital health covering privately owned platforms that provide such a broad range of services. Since the startup combines telemedicine, delivery of medication, booking of appointments and software that helps clinics and hospitals run their operations, it has also struggled to find a single licensing category that covers the whole business.
Alemayehu said she is still negotiating with Ethiopian officials, presenting Medanit's user figures as evidence of how widely the platform has been taken up and of the savings it could bring to patients and to the wider health system. She hopes that a startup proclamation currently under consideration will establish a regulatory sandbox, giving firms such as Medanit room to operate while the full regulations are still being developed.
Bayer Foundation backing for Medanit Ethiopia
It was this money and day-to-day running pressures that drove her to apply for the Bayer Foundation Women Entrepreneurs Award. She was among the 15 women honoured in 2026. Each awardee is given €25,000 ($28,000) without surrendering any equity, and joins an accelerator programme lasting six months, offering mentoring tailored to each business, help with building the company, and introductions to industry networks.
“We were looking for a way that will help us to scale. We wanted to optimise what we already have and become more innovative,” she said.
Medanit is expected to use the money to refine the systems it already runs and to bolster its telemedicine and medication delivery offerings. Alemayehu says she hopes the backing will let the company tackle the operational bottlenecks that have held back its growth, leaving it better placed to serve more patients.
Looking ahead: Rwanda, Zambia and beyond
Over the next twelve months, Medanit plans to serve 3 million to 4 million Ethiopians who presently lack any healthcare, with a focus on rural communities. Looking further out, Alemayehu wants the company to serve 100 million Ethiopians and to move into a minimum of 20 other African countries within 5–10 years.
The founder says the firm is already looking into Rwanda and Zambia, and intends to launch in both markets by 2027.
Alemayehu traces her motivation to her years as a nurse, when she watched patients struggle to receive treatment in good time. Her aim is for Medanit to ease access to healthcare for those who could end up losing many hours searching for medicines, diagnostic services or a suitable doctor.
“What we are building is not a luxury product,” she said. “We are out here saving lives, and the fewer hours people have to spend searching for healthcare, the more I know we are achieving our goal.”
Real scale calls for solid execution rather than shallow integration. For Moonshot 2026, we have cut out the clutter and shaped the conference purely around meaningful, high-quality links between startup founders, international finance professionals, enterprise heads and those reworking the technical foundations of Africa. For a short time, Early Bird tickets are available at a 20% discount.
