Meet the Students Bringing Digital Health Solutions to Hospitals in West Africa

A 20-year-old walking into a room of a hospital CEO isn’t the typical image of healthcare innovation.

But for Alpime Health, a startup run by Northwestern undergraduates out of The Garage, securing two pilot programs this month to test their technology in West Africa is just the first step in their mission to transform medical recordkeeping.

Alpime Health, co-founded by Northwestern juniors Isaac Meite and Tahira Grewal, helps hospitals in West Africa and beyond switch from paper to electronic medical record systems. They recently announced a pilot program with Polyclinique Internationale Sainte-Anne-Marie (PISAM), a hospital in Côte d’Ivoire.

“Those very established doctors and CEOs of hospitals are seeing me walk into their office as a 20-year-old university student from Chicago,” Meite said. “They have no idea who I am, and yet they gave me enough trust to say ‘yes, I’m willing to test out your solution and figure out if there’s something beneficial in it.’”

Meite grew up splitting his time between Côte d’Ivoire and France. He quickly noticed disparities in the standards of medical care between the countries.

“When a patient comes into a hospital on the Ivory Coast, the first barrier really is that most of the time, their records are either lost or they're buried in a dark room in the corner of the hospital where other paper records are stored,” Meite said. “They have to essentially retell their medical history to every doctor that they encounter.”

Doctors agree that this is an issue. A 2023 study conducted by Alpime Health in West African hospitals found that 78.6% of medical workers felt unsupported by existing paper-based record systems, while 85.7% said there were no existing tools available to transition from paper to digital records systems.

When Meite met Grewal, a Computer Science student in his orientation group at Northwestern, they knew their complimentary skills could be used to find a solution. Now, the duo are Residents at The Garage and are participating in the Winter 2025 cohort of the X-Factor program.

Their solution comes in the form of Alpime Mozart, the digital tool currently being piloted in two clinics in West Africa. Mozart is designed to convert a doctor’s handwritten notes into structured, searchable electronic files.

“The idea of the technology is to automate processes and to minimize work on the side of the client. By designing it like this, we're able to do that,” Grewal said.

Although stakeholders agree that a problem of inefficiency exists in West African hospitals, the co-founders concede that convincing institutions to adopt their solution has come with some challenges.

“Doctors find it much faster to just write on paper and scribble something and have someone else deal with that problem,” Grewal said. “People are used to paper and pen, and that works at a speed that maybe they don’t feel comfortable working on a laptop or computer.”

To address this, Alpime Health is making staff training a top priority, according to Grewal.

While their current pilot programs are in Côte d’Ivoire, Alpime Health’s mission extends far beyond West Africa. They are already in talks to launch more pilots in India, where both Mozart and other Alpime platforms can be tested.

“Our anticipation is that Mozart will exist for maybe five to ten years, because the whole [paper-to-digital] transition process is long and exhausting and involves multiple stakeholders,” Grewal explained. “But as we move forward, we want to start focusing more on Alpime Oasis, which is our predictive analytics tool.”

Alpime Health’s mission is to bring digital health solutions to underserved regions, complete with secure data management, intuitive interfaces, and seamless integration into existing workflows, according to Meite. This mission has no geographical bounds.

“The way we define underserved regions is not just countries in the Global South, but it’s any healthcare system that is either fragmented or siloed and doesn’t have the ability to operate efficiently,” Meite said. “That includes regions like Africa, India, the Philippines, but also surprisingly rural America.”

As Alpime Health continues to grow, the co-founders reflect on the moments that made them believe their vision could truly change lives.

For Meite, the act of signing the two contracts with hospitals in Côte d’Ivoire was the most gratifying moment of this journey. For Grewal, competing in VentureCat 2024 and winning First Place in the Life Sciences and Medical Innovation Track showed her the value of their efforts.

“It signaled that we were headed in the right direction, and I think Isaac and I are both very big on signals,” Grewal said. “That entire journey really pushed us in the direction that allowed us to be where we are today and still have relentless optimism towards the future."