Main Product: Sage
Sage is a data analytics service for insurance agents, providing insights into your client base in order to help you streamline your sales efforts and make more money with less effort. Sage is powered by Project Fort, a data analytics firm specializing in community-based wellness. Our goal is to build and scale the digital infrastructure necessary to shape healthier Filipino communities for generations to come. Our reports outline actionable insights gleaned from the community data you provided as part of our data analytics service agreement. Using this report, you’ll be able to focus your client outreach efforts on the people, products, and premiums most likely to result in actual sales. We utilize industry-leading practices in data modeling and public health practice. Insights in this report are intended to guide your sales efforts and are not assurances of future outcomes.
Support Product: Project Fort
Project Fort helps companies save money and improve overall employee health by using community
-based data to develop dynamic wellness strategies. Think of it as a Fitbit service, but for your whole workforce.
Company Overview
Name: Fort Health Data Systems Inc. (Project Fort)
Description: Project Fort is a subscription-based health data consultancy specializing in developing wellness strategies for communities.
Service: Community health data analytics
Email: erika@projectfort.com
Website: https://www.projectfort.com
Address: 1129 J. Natividad Lopez St. Bgy. 659-A Ermita, City of Manila, NCR, Philippines, 1000
Individual Founder Information
Name: Cheyenne Ariana Erika M. Modina
Email: erika@projectfort.com
Mobile Number: +639175113529
Position: CEO
Experience: I am the CEO of Project Fort and the President of EpiMetrics Inc., a health research institution based in the Philippines geared towards the achievement of health equity through health systems and policy research. I am currently handling research projects under the Philippine Department of Health, World Health Organization, and the United Nations Population Fund. As a public health researcher, my studies have been integral to the development of the Universal Health Care Law and the Guidelines for the Maximum Retail Price of Drug and Medicine in the Philippines. Aside from being a researcher, I am also a lecturer under the Health Sciences Program in Ateneo de Manila University. I am passionate about empowering the youth to use design thinking in public health and to increase health literacy through research and digital healthy settings in the Philippines.
Expertise: Public Health
Links: LinkedIn, Facebook
Company Financial Model
Company Stage: Pre-seed/Seed Stage
Capital Seeking: Currently looking for strategic partnerships, specifically in the public sector.
The Problem
According to an ILO study published earlier this month, roughly 745,000 people die annually due to poor working conditions. The study found this especially true in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asian regions. Long working hours, psychological stress, health-harming behavior to deal with that stress, and resulting strokes and heart disease — were all listed as contributing factors. Now what does that look like locally? Annually, Filipino businesses lose at least P100 billion pesos due to poor employee health. This is in spite of companies already spending roughly P150 billion trying to take care of employees.
The takeaway here is that companies are spending their money on the wrong things because of a lack of proper insight into employee health. Insights that can only be gleaned, given the right tools and expertise. We believe there’s a better, proactive way to care for our people.
Our Solution
Our solution: Project Fort, a wellness tool that provides insights into your workforce, allowing you to make data driven decisions around wellness — driving down costs and increasing productivity.
Most firms, even those with robust databases, organize their data like this. Siloed, nebulous. More importantly, other determinants that affect employee wellbeing often go overlooked. These include working arrangements, financial health, and the like.
We use our data gathering tools to synthesize & analyze workforce health information based on global best practices in public health. In doing so, we unlock insights that are impossible to glean on an individual level, so they can be turned into strategies for sustainable, meaningful changes on a community level.
We allow companies to mitigate health-related losses by keeping them on the pulse of workforce wellness. With daily, weekly, and monthly insights — guided by our experts — management teams can identify and address issues well before they arise. And in the mid-to-long-term, leverage their grasp on employee data to negotiate better health packages & reduce health plan spending. All at a fraction of the cost they would be incurring otherwise.
Business Model
Project Fort’s revenue model is structured as a subscription service, offered in monthly engagements. Companies get access to daily, weekly, & monthly insight reports, with an added premium option to engage with one of our workforce wellness officers to turn those insights into action steps towards data-driven strategies.
Each of these reports provide insights gleaned from correlations between physical wellbeing, socioemotional wellbeing, financial health, and environmental health factors. All of these factors we gather using our daily check-in tool. Management teams can then engage with our health experts, or utilize the insights themselves, to build dynamic wellness strategies tailored to the exact needs of their workforce.
We start with a flat platform fee of P5,000, and charge between P40 to P80 per employee, depending on total workforce size.
Challenges
Our approach to community health, which is founded on public health practice and the healthy settings frameworks of the World Health Organization, recognizes wellbeing as a many-faceted equation that requires collaborations across the care continuum to champion. The traditional view of health stakeholders spanning patients, providers, and insurers fails to factor in the massively influential role that employers, school administrators, and local government units play in the daily health of our communities.
Our main challenge as a startup is establishing touchpoints across those different healthy settings to ensure we can deliver a truly whole-of-society approach to community care. Striking strategic partnerships is our primary goal at the moment. While we are making great strides already, we have yet to find a champion in the public sector that can help us scale more meaningfully to more communities.
The Landscape
Globally, the market for Big Data in Healthcare is expected to grow to $ 67.8 billion dollars by 2025, while the Asia-Pacific Healthcare Analytics market is expected to grow to $4.42 billion in that same time. Locally, we situate ourselves in the $3 billion market for Employee Care.
Initially, we will be focusing on BPOs as they have the means and incentive to invest in caring for their relatively larger workforces. According to latest data from PEZA, there are 788 locally registered BPOs. This industry employs about 1.3 million FIlipinos, with an average size would be 1,700 employees. To reach Cash Flow Neutral, the target is to land 6-10 BPO clients, depending on their size.
So what do these companies get out of fortifying their workplace? Based on our studies, there are two main factors connected with workforce wellbeing that affect these businesses’ bottom lines: Workforce Attrition and Poor Health.
Turnover among BPO workers is among the highest across industries, with most estimates pegged at 30 percent per year. Among the top reasons: poor working environments. This leads not only to talent drain, but additional costs associated with recruitment and training.
To make matters worse, productivity loss due to poor health, which accounts for 2/3 of companies’ health costs, is staggering among BPOs. Migraines alone, which are triggered by poor mental wellbeing & work arrangements, amount to an annualized average of about P28,000 per person in lost productivity. That means the average BPO sees a potential loss of over P47 million. That’s per company, per year. Just from Migraines alone. Compound that with other impairments like back pain, obesity, or chronic diseases like hypertension and heart disease.
Most innovations in healthcare today fall under new delivery methods: home care, telemedicine. While these are essential stepping stones in making care more accessible, they still operate under the same paradigm of individual, curative care. Addressing health problems, after they’ve become problems.
Project Fort represents a new paradigm, an entirely different approach, rooted in the science of public health. We take a holistic definition of what it means to be healthy, and use data-driven strategies to offer proactive, community care.
Our Traction
Our mission is to build data tools to generate meaningful insights for healthier communities. In addition to serving the Ever Gotesco community with our health data analytics, we’ve also partnered with Medicare Plus, an HMO to provide exclusive health plans for our users. We are steadily laying the groundwork to expand beyond workplaces.
Building on our initial focus on BPOs, we’re currently in talks with 17 universities in Cavite to manage roughly 30,000 students as they transition back to hybrid remote-and-classroom learning. While this may take on a different pricing scheme, due to scale & services students need, this arrangement with the Cavite State University community alone may already accelerate us to Cash Flow Neutral.
We recently closed an investment deal with SFIO, a global investment holding company listed in the US & based out of New Zealand. Under this partnership, we will be co-developing a community health dashboard for townships, a major step forward towards our ultimate goal of building data-driven, tech-enabled public health systems for LGUs. We will be developing and operating a new version of Project Fort, catering to the wellness tourism townships being developed in Batangas and Palawan. Through SFIO, we are also partnered with NeuroSky, a health wearable developer based in Silicon Valley. We’re already in talks with the group to build proprietary wearables under the Project Fort brand to augment our data gathering efforts.
With 500k and 3 months, we will be able to focus exclusively on upgrading our technologies to better service these townships.
The Team
To do all this, we’ve assembled a team of expert care professionals in the fields of public health and workforce wellness management. Our CEO, Erika Modina is concurrently the President of a research institution called EpiMetrics. Through her experience consulting for the DOH, and international organizations like UNICEF, she’s built a network of researchers and care providers that share our vision of a community-based care ecosystem. This includes our team of workforce wellness officers, all MD-MBA holders, who specialize in health management strategies.