Interswitch Limited has officially announced the acquisition of e-Clat Healthcare Limited, a Nigeria-based health technology company that aims to improve healthcare delivery in Africa.
The digital payments company completed the acquisition on September 30, 2019. In the deal, Interswitch will acquire a 60% stage e-Clat through the purchase of shares from current shareholders and subscription to new shares issued by the company.
e-Clat Healthcare Limited specializes in assisting healthcare service providers in planning, designing and operating their unique practices through the deployment of its bespoke healthcare technology platform, designed specifically for the healthcare environment in Africa.
Prior to the acquisition, e-Clat’s platform had become a leading Electronic Health Record (EHR) platform used in over 250 public and private healthcare facilities in Nigeria.
With the acquisition, Interswitch’s hopes to grow its healthcare product offerings and position the company’s healthcare technology platform to be one of the top industry platforms in Nigeria, which can be utilised as a major data source by healthcare policymakers for planning and efficiency improvements in the sector.
The combined product offerings of Interswitch and e-Clat are expected to, amongst other things, enable operators in the healthcare sector develop new capabilities, improve the efficiency of their core operations and facilitate seamless payments.
Commenting on the transaction, Mitchell Elegbe, Founder and Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Interswitch, said:
“We are a technology company that is innovating to deliver value across sectors that are critical to Africa’s social and economic development, our acquisition of e-Clat demonstrates strong progress along this strategy and alignment with our corporate vision.
Healthcare is rapidly evolving towards new, integrated and scalable models of care delivery that put the consumer at the centre. At the core of Interswitch’s expansion into healthcare is our ambition to provide customers with greater access to healthcare across different interaction points beyond hospitals, such as at pharmacies and primary health care facilities, providing much needed services to patients across Nigeria and, in the future, in Africa. It also represents an opportunity to introduce a number of Interswitch’s products, such as our Verve Health cards, as well as our payment collection & disbursement solutions (Quickteller for business), that will drive much needed efficiency in payments for health services across the value chain”.
Also remarking on the acquisition, Dr. Wallace Ogufere co-founder/CEO of e-Clat Healthcare Limited stated :
“The growing adoption of value-based care, combined with the increasing level of usage of patient portals across the industry, has made it critical to take a new approach to patient engagement solution design in Nigeria. We expect to tightly integrate the e-Clat capabilities into the Interswitch platform, adding functionality that would enable providers to reach their entire patient populations by leveraging existing patient contact information”.
