Medanit Builds Digital Health Records and Pharmacy Access

In Short

• Medanit is a digital healthcare platform focused on making care easier to access in Ethiopia.
• It expanded from a simple healthcare directory into hospital software, electronic medical records, and pharmacy delivery.
• The startup says it has onboarded 520+ doctors, reached 1.2 million visitors, and received backing from the Bayer Foundation.
• Medanit is preparing to expand into Rwanda and Zambia.

What Happened

Medanit started after founder Beamlak Alemayehu, a trained nurse and social worker, saw how hard it was for patients in Ethiopia to find medicines, diagnostic tests, and specialist care. In a public hospital emergency ward in 2020, she watched patients lose hours moving from pharmacy to pharmacy to fill prescriptions.

Alemayehu launched Medikea in 2022 as a “clean digital directory”, meaning a searchable list of providers and services that patients can quickly navigate. But when she tried to connect clinics and pharmacies to the platform, she found that many facilities still relied on paper ledgers and manual processes. She estimated that 80% to 90% had no usable digital records.

That forced a change in scope. Instead of only routing patients to existing providers, Medanit began building the underlying tools those providers lacked. This included hospital management software and an EMR system, short for electronic medical records, basically a patient file that lives on a computer instead of a folder. It also set up pharmacy delivery logistics and a call centre, so people without smartphones can still place requests and get help.

Why It Matters

Healthtech products often fail when they assume hospitals already have structured data and modern workflows. Medanit’s approach shows a different playbook for markets where digitisation is still early, build the “back office” first, then scale patient-facing services.

If Medanit can replicate this model in Rwanda and Zambia, it could become a template for how digital health platforms grow across Africa, especially where medication availability and referral pathways are fragmented.