The people behind healthcare innovation: Interview with Kees van Lede, CEO and Co-founder of CarePay

As part of our work, we have the privilege to speak with many inspiring innovators. Although the business community usually focuses on companies, pitches, and valuations—and less on the innovator—we thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about the people behind healthcare innovation. In this series, we’re sharing some of our conversations with innovators in a condensed format to gain insights into their experience, their opinions, and their learnings.

This latest conversation is with Kees van Lede, CEO and Co-founder of CarePay, a social venture with the ambition to transform healthcare in Africa via cloud-based and mobile technology and Marilyn Kimeu, Associate Partner at McKinsey focused on Global Public Health.

Marilyn and Tobias: What’s your story and how did you become an innovator in healthcare?

Kees: My journey began when I was working for a consumer product company in South Africa. I worked on a big nutrition project that was inspired by C.K. Prahalad’s book The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. The book highlights the potential for businesses to develop innovative products that meet the unique needs of underprivileged communities. The new product we launched turned out to be a huge success and showed me that, if you really focus on it with a small group of passionate people, you can produce something truly valuable and impactful.

After that, I moved back to The Netherlands where I worked at a scaleup for a few years. However, I felt unfulfilled. I wanted to make a real impact on society like I felt when working in South Africa. That is when fate intervened and I met Onno Schellekens. He told me about PharmAccess Foundation (the NGO where he was CEO) and how it had just signed a memorandum of understanding with M-PESA, a mobile money service in Africa. He explained their vision of using mobile technology to make healthcare more accessible and affordable. I was aware of the impact of M-PESA from my time in South Africa and was fascinated by the way it had reinvented the mobile banking industry and changed the lives of millions who had previously been excluded from banking services.

It felt like the perfect opportunity to make a real difference and it aligned with my interest in “reverse innovation”—the idea that innovation can flow from emerging markets to developed markets, not just the other way around. This is exactly what we’re now doing at CarePay with our M-TIBA (CarePay’s go-to-market brand in Kenya) platform—starting in Kenya and expanding globally.

Marilyn and Tobias: Where do you see healthcare accessibility and financing moving to over the next ten years?

Kees: “The healthcare industry is one of the largest and fastest-growing industries in the world. And it will always remain important because everyone will face health challenges at some point in their lives. But despite its importance and impact on the world economy, the industry remains highly fragmented, and patients often feel left out of the loop when it comes to their own care. This can lead to trust issues, misinformation, and inefficiencies, leaving many feeling unsure of how to control and pay for their health journey effectively.

To address these challenges, the future of healthcare needs to put patients at the heart of the journey. Significantly, consumers are demanding closer involvement through a more digital and mobile experience. Although most technology companies focus on serving institutions like insurers and healthcare providers, companies that prioritize the needs of the individual will be best positioned to shape the future of healthcare, by giving people greater control over their own health journey and making healthcare more accessible for everyone. Having the right information and technology is the first step. Companies need to build and ensure trust through transparency, security, and privacy so the healthcare industry grows alongside.

This guiding principle is at the core of what we do at CarePay. We started with the “mobile health wallet,” a solution designed specifically for individuals, rather than insurers or hospitals. By putting individuals first—as every health journey starts with an action by a member—we’re helping to democratize the healthcare industry and make a real difference in people’s lives.

Marilyn and Tobias: Looking more broadly, what are the biggest opportunities and obstacles you see for innovation in the healthcare environment?

Kees: Digitization is already becoming more widely adopted in the healthcare industry for managing business risk and to optimize efficiency and effectiveness. However, other areas are still lagging when it comes to digitization. Especially in the highly fragmented outpatient care market (also known as ambulatory care) there is much to gain from digitizing low-value, high-volume transactions. Digitization will not only lower costs in the long run, but the data from these transactions will make it easier to address inefficiencies, as well as improve the quality of healthcare provided to patients. Ambulatory healthcare can account for up to 50 percent of all healthcare costs; transforming it is a major opportunity to make healthcare both more affordable and also to reach the uninsured population who are still struggling to pay for healthcare in many countries.

Marilyn and Tobias: When you look at the health system as a whole (providers, payers, doctors, patients), who do you see driving innovation the most?

Kees: I strongly believe that the key to real change in healthcare lies in putting individuals first. Drawing inspiration from the way other consumer tech companies have placed the individual at the center, I see a huge potential to transform the healthcare ecosystem with a similar consumer-first approach. Regulators should set clear rules so the private sector is incentivized to optimize and improve, while always protecting the interests of the general public and the privacy of each individual.

By shifting focus to engagement and retention of members, we can drive change and make healthcare more affordable and accessible.

I feel that younger generations are increasingly looking for a sense of community, locally but also on a global scale, to care for each other across borders in a direct and personal way. Along with advancements in technology, this trend has led to the emergence of innovative insurance solutions. These solutions allow us to take care of each other across borders, and I believe they represent a promising way forward for the industry.

Marilyn and Tobias: In your opinion, what is the single most important change that will better enable digital transformation in health systems?

Kees: Standardization will be crucial. The importance of standardization in data exchange can be seen in the rise of the internet. Standardization allowed the industry to exchange information globally and revolutionized communication around the world. Similarly, for standardization in healthcare data exchange, there needs to be a way to share data responsibly so it can be used for the public good, such as learning and prevention, without compromising individual privacy. Europe has taken a lead in protecting individual privacy rights; however, we need to ensure that data can be effectively exchanged to increase accessibility, affordability, and availability of healthcare delivery without violating individuals’ privacy. People should be reassured that data will be used for their benefit.

Marilyn and Tobias: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were starting out as an innovator?

Kees: You can read a lot of books and watch many inspirational talks about innovation and entrepreneurship, many of which seem like some sort of recipe for success that you simply need to follow. My experience, however, is that making breakthrough innovation happen is unpredictable, messy, and tough. The only way to still make it happen against those odds is by surrounding yourself with people who are better and even more passionate than you about your mission. Ideally, those people are also fun to be with, which is definitely the case at CarePay!

For more information, see Kees van Lede and CarePay.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and his guest contributor and do not reflect the views of McKinsey & Company.