Innovasalud: Quality healthcare for informal workers

In theory, everyone in Bolivia has access to the country’s universal public healthcare system. Of the 80% of employed Bolivians who work in the informal sector, however, only 63% are registered for it. Public primary care facilities are known to be short on doctors, overcrowded, of poor quality and highly ineffective. Most low-income Bolivians postpone going to the doctor until they are extremely ill, whereupon they face long waiting times and high out-of-pocket costs.

The public health system provides little preventative care, as evidenced by Bolivia’s high rates of preventable illness. For example, the country has Latin America’s highest incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer, a disease that can be prevented or cured through early detection.

Innovasalud offers low-income informal workers in Bolivia affordable, convenient and quality primary healthcare services through its network of clinics. The clinics can be accessed through pre-paid voluntary health plans that consist of bundles of pre-defined primary and preventative healthcare services – mainly medical assessments, general consultations and cancer tests – over a specific period of time. The venture thus co-designs, underwrites and sells pre-paid health plans specifically for use in its clinics.

To make its offer accessible to low-income informal workers, Innovasalud relies on microfinance institutions to promote and finance the plans, that is, to extend credit to people who wish to enrol. Patients benefit from having access to quality primary healthcare services at an Innovasalud clinic, and if they are diagnosed with a secondary or tertiary health problem, the doctor will either refer them to partner specialists. Timely preventative care spares patients avoidable and more serious illness and the larger, unpredictable expenditures it often brings.

Microfinance institutions benefit from being able to offer a well-aligned, value-driven service to their clients – improving their performance, as healthier clients are better payers – as well as to differentiate their offering from competitors’ and to grow their assets under management.

Innovasalud was founded in 2018 as a joint venture between ProMujer and Solydes. As of May 2023, the venture operated 31 clinics in busy urban and suburban areas of 15 cities located across Bolivia’s nine departments. In 2022, Innovasalud sold 71 000 plans and treated 15 000 patients, of whom 97% were registered with a pre-paid health plan. In 2022, 79% of the services provided were medical preventive consultations, 22% were preventative consultations or women’s cancer tests and 18% were general consultations.

Innovasalud will use the award funding to:

• Raise awareness and provide education on the importance of health and health prevention to drive usage and adoption of its offer among low-income informal workers
• Expand its clinical services to include, for example, rapid test-reading equipment and tele-medicine systems
• Streamline the infrastructure at its clinics and make the clinics physically independent of ProMujer’s premises

Innovasalud Impact Performance Report - 60 Decibels

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