Nomadic care

Mobile dialysis centers to facilitate access to healthcare: that's the idea of Anass El Hilal. With his unique trucks soon to be criss-crossing Morocco, this enterprising student and entrepreneur is embarking on the social economy.
It all began during a trip to Morocco. Anass El Hilal was taking a leisurely stroll down the street when an old lady was taken ill: "she was suffering from kidney failure and had just returned from dialysis."he confides. A scene that "clicks"for the young engineer who graduated from Polytech : "I asked myself how I could help people live better with kidney failure.". This disease requires patients to undergo 3 dialysis sessions a week. A particularly complicated process in Morocco "because people often live far from dialysis centers and the journeys are long and tiring".

Making life easier for dialysis patients

The young man then had an idea that could well change the lives of patients: if they can't go to dialysis, then dialysis will go to them. To bring this project to fruition, Anass El Hilal returned to university, where he opted for Polytech's student-entrepreneur diploma, an innovative scheme that enabled him to benefit from the advice of university and professional tutors. " Strategy, marketing, business model...This course taught me all the tricks of the trade that enabled me to launch my own business.
And that company is Medtrucks. Its aim is to design trucks equipped with medical equipment to serve as mobile dialysis centers. " Our aim is to provide healthcare professionals with innovative solutions," explains Anass El Hilal. Innovative and hyperconnected, the truck will feature videoconferencing tools that will enable nurses to contact a nephrologist to discuss a patient's case if necessary. "Patient medical records will also be teletransmitted to a fixed dialysis center for consultation by the specialist" , explains the young entrepreneur.

Medtrucks to criss-cross Morocco

First step in the project: mapping needs. " We need to know where the patients who would need our services live, so we can determine the itinerary of the dialysis trucks". How do we do this? Through social networks. "Everyone in Morocco has a smartphone, so we're asking people suffering from kidney failure to report themselves, which will enable us to draw up an interactive map".
Next objective: launch the first truck in early 2016. To begin with, Medtrucks will criss-cross the Tiznit region in the south of the country, which is acting as a pilot area, but eventually Anass hopes to deploy several trucks throughout Morocco, "then expand to other Maghreb countries... and why not to the rest of Africa!".