Engage Mx wins big in Future Trust awards

Engage Mx, an intelligent health platform for screening and chronic disease management, won the Tech Entrepreneur category at the 2024 South African Future Trust (SAFT) Awards this week. 

The SAFT awards recognises exceptional achievements of leading entrepreneurs and innovators in SA. The awards event was co-hosted by SAFT chairman Jonathan Oppenheimer and media entrepreneur Tumelo Mothotoane.

Engage Mx won for a system that recalls patients to their doctor for screening, based on their health profile. 

“We want to disrupt the entire nature and flow of health care from being reactive to proactive,” CEO of Engage Mx, Dr Benji Ozynski told Gadget at the event. “We go and see the doctor after some time, some tests are done, and we are given a diagnosis.

“Our vision is to revolutionise healthcare so that those patients are identified long before they develop those symptoms, so that future long-life diagnosis can either be prevented entirely, or its severity can be mitigated through early detection.”

Dr Ozynski said that there is no time to look through an entire database of patient data, and identify which patients need to return to their doctor for further medical assistance. 

“With non-communicable diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer resulting in extremely high mortality rates, we wanted to solve this problem.”

Dr Brad Segal, CTO of Engage Mx, told us: “We pull together varied data sources to track patients and their conditions, and analyse them on an individual level. However, we want to start looking at these things at scale. We are starting to process large amounts of patients, and we are trying to see how we can scale that approach.

“Instead of having one solution on a single patient, we are starting to look at how we can look at aggregate analytics across all patients – their patterns of engagement, medication, as well as trying to empower doctors that are engaged with these patients to bring them back, and also how we can improve the way that they engage.

“A big thing we want to be getting into is a predictive space. We pull from billing data, medication data, and laboratory data to identify the severity of patients’ conditions. Through that, we can identify specific subgroups of patients that need to be contacted for doctors to look at, or screen.”

Engage Mx is seeking to provide reports and analytics for practices to provide them with a greater understanding of their patients. 

“As a GP or a doctor in a certain community, it’s not that you just treat several patients in a clinic every day, but rather that you have a community of several thousand people, which represents generally a large amount of diverse conditions,” said Segal.

“One wants to see how trends change year-on-year, how one’s prescribing habits change, and what disease trends are changing. All of that is analytics which is currently locked away from a doctor, and so it’s a space that is ripe to be cracked open.”

The runners-up in the technology category were Yazi, a market research company that uses WhatsApp for data collection, and RoomKing, a platform that simplifies finding and listing rooms for rent.

Notably, all the co-founders of Engage MX— Ozynski, Segal, director Ryan Swartzberg, head of sales Mayur Ambelal, and head of operations Kyle Le Bron— are under 35, as are Timothy Treagus, CEO of Yazi, and Modicai Nmculwane, CEO of RoomKing.

Other categories, and their respective winners include:

Innovation

• Bento Technologies (Pty) Ltd – Winner
• JOBJACK – Finalist
• Yazi – Finalist

Youth                

• JOBJACK – Winner
• Greenmovement Energy – Finalist
• AB Farms – Finalist

Social              

• WeThinkCode – Finalist
• RLabs – Winner
• SFG Tec – Finalist

Playbook        

• Woodlam – Winner
• Stavrou Consulting – Finalist
• The Hair Rejuvenation Centre (THRC) – Finalist

Women in Business Award

• Tshepiso Branding Solutions (Pty) Ltd – Winner
• Jaybeezzz Trading and Projects – Finalist
• RealPPE Marketplace – Finalist

Each category winner received R500,000, including a cash injection of R250,000 for immediate business growth. A support package with mentorship from industry leaders and essential resources to accelerate their business trajectory is included.

SAFT is an initiative founded by the Oppenheimer family to empower and support entrepreneurs during the Covid-19 pandemic, SAFT has been instrumental in providing both financial and non-financial assistance to SMEs across various sectors.

The SAFT Awards served as the official launch for the 2024 SAFT Summit, which brings together visionaries, innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. It is scheduled for October.

* Visit the Engage Mx website here.

* Visit the South African Future Trust website here.

*Jason Bannier is a data analyst at World Wide Worx and writer for Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Threads at @jas2bann.