The Patient Focus Story

The Beginning

Our Patient Focus Africa story began much like most, with a purpose in mind, a passion in our hearts and a problem to solve.

Empowering beyond the products

The problem was, the health industry had lost sight of the person it should be centered around, the patient. Patients did not and often still don’t have control and autonomy over their own health. The process is broken when a patient’s results are more in the hands of the health care providers than the patient themselves.

Enter Patient Focus Africa (PFA).
With a goal as novel as its namesake and yet as ambitious as its founders; “to put the focus on the patient”. Jacques and Zella du Toit set about to do just that. Pioneering this purpose by sourcing wellness solutions locally and globally that empowered health.

Jacques

“We started with the idea that the focus on healthcare was all about everyone except for the person who actually makes the entire healthcare chain work: the Patient. Hence our name Patient Focus Africa- we wanted health to be patient centred. By providing access to health solutions that enable the ability to do early detection of disease”

Empowering beyond the products

PFA has been empowering health for 25 years. A quarter century of pioneering patient centricity and innovative healthcare solutions to age old problems. Within this, there have been many notable moments and firsts.

PFA was the first to bring decentralized pathology to the field, making risk assessment more accessible, convenient, and accurate for patients.

PFA operates in over 42 countries and has played a pivotal role in enabling wellness companies to conduct screenings at the employer level, ensuring early risk detection.

PFA was one of the first companies to perform lipid tests using a handheld analyser.

As well as being one of the first to introduce 24H Ambulatory Blood Pressure monitoring.

Notably, the World Health Organization (WHO) has relied exclusively on our ‘Lab in a Bag’ concept for more than 15 years.

PFA has consistently led the way in introducing breakthrough technologies to both pharmacies and doctors’ offices

The learnings

PFA is more than a company, more than logo and a letterhead, PFA is a combined effort of its people and the lessons we have learnt along the way. The team has learnt to trust their guts and make it happen. So long as we are failing forward, we are learning. So no setbacks have ever made us give up on our dreams.

“The PFA story is centered around: Passion, passion, and more passion for what we do – doing whatever it takes to make customers trust in us.”

-Jacques

The What’s next

The thing about an organisation founded on innovation and always striving to find a better way… is we will alwasy be striving to find a better way. So our next chapter involves integrating connected Point of Care with Near Patient Pathology.

We are currently involved in supplying the 1st of a new category of Laboratory: Near Patient Pathology

Essentially this means delivering real time results at the testing site without sending bloods to a central pathology laboratory. Our current focus is to set up decentralized smaller labs where patients can do the test they need in minutes and not having to wait for
results i.e in Emergency Rooms and Oncology Centres.

Soon we will be able to offer a concierge type service at Dr’s offices – where the test will be done in the Drs room and the results will be overseen by a pathologist.
We are also working on Dry Spot technology that will enable patients to do a test from the comfort of their homes – Uber drives delivers a small test device – a few drops of capillary blood sealed in a container and the driver delivers this to our labs . The blood gets reconstituted and results back to the patient in 48 hours without them having to leave their home.
All results will be sent to Dr’s and simultaneously to the patient via an App in easy to interpret/layman’s terms. Your number will be colour coded: either green(normal), orange (early risk detected) or red (you need medical help immediately).

The future of patient centralised healthcare is here and PFA is not only ready for it but we are driving it.

We are in 42 different countries

Partial owners

MOHAU partly owns Patient Focus Africa (PFA) . Mohau Investments (Pty) Limited (Mohau Investments) is a diversified investment company that invests both monetary and intellectual capital in promising businesses while assisting them to achieve their transformation objectives.