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Knife Capital, a South African venture capital firm, has invested in Alignd, a Cape Town-based company that designs value-based care programmes for medical schemes. The money, from Knife Fund III, will support Alignd’s expansion beyond palliative care into maternity and kidney care.
Founded in 2018, the company sells its programmes to medical schemes rather than directly to patients. Instead of paying healthcare providers for each service they deliver, Alignd’s model ties payment to the outcomes that matter to patients. The aim is to align the incentives of patients, their healthcare providers and their medical scheme.
Alignd started with palliative care. Medical schemes have traditionally covered costly in-hospital care at the end of life, but not home-based support. The company built a network of more than 500 providers delivering home-based care. It reports a one-third reduction in non-beneficial chemotherapy in the final month of life, and says two-thirds of its patients died at home or in hospice. Providers were reimbursed more fairly for work that delivered value, while schemes saved more than R600 million (about $36 million).
Alignd has partnerships with seven medical schemes, including GEMS, Fedhealth and Bonitas, and its palliative programme covers more than 3.3 million lives.
Its maternity programme links parents, providers and schemes, with support tailored to each family. The kidney care programme coordinates care across the clinical team to help patients with chronic kidney disease preserve their kidney function for as long as possible and live well when the kidney is no longer functioning. It also aims to help schemes manage long-term costs.
“South Africa’s private healthcare system largely pays for activity rather than outcomes, and patients and their families often carry the cost of that misalignment,” said Dr Lungi Nyathi, chief executive officer of Alignd. “In palliative care, we’ve shown that when patients, providers, and schemes pull in the same direction, and the system around that care is well-designed, the quality of care goes up and unnecessary spend comes down. Knife Capital’s backing, and their experience in scaling businesses locally and abroad, gives us the support to take that model into maternity and kidney care, where the need is just as urgent.”
“Alignd stood out to us because this is a women-founded team that has taken on a difficult problem in healthcare and proven that there is a better way to deliver care,” said Catherine Young, partner at Knife Capital. “The outcomes they are achieving are meaningful for the patients, providers, and medical schemes. It is exactly the kind of business we want to back, and it further strengthens the healthtech vertical we are building at Knife Capital. I am excited to work with Lungi and the team as they scale into new areas of care.”
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