Wael Wahby received his MPA at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2018 and earned an MD, Masters of Sciences and Doctoral degree of Internal Medicine at the Cairo University. Wael is also an Egyptian Lecturer of Internal Medicine and Nephrology in the Faculty of Medicine, leader of the Nephrology Department Quality Improvement Team, and a Quality Improvement Trainer in the Faculty Leadership Development Center of Cairo University. His passion is to deploy underutilized resources to better care for underserved medical patients. This drive led him to co-found PDNE (Patient Doctor New Era): the first student-run volunteer based healthcare quality improvement initiative in Egypt. Since its founding, PDNE has recruited more than 4,000 volunteers and served more than 36,000 patients by tapping underutilized interns and medical students.
As a Cheng Fellow, Wael continued to pursue innovation for better health care systems through Smartdoc: an online profile for patients allowing automatic electronic collection of all their medical data from doctors, labs, radiology centers and pharmacies and with a customized presentation for each user. The service was launched in May 2018 and aims to streamline communications across the Egyptian medical system, reducing errors for better patient outcomes. Smardoc’s has a unique revenue model, based on volume-based discounts from partnering labs, radiology centers and pharmacies. This allows digitized healthcare to be free of charge for doctors, hospitals and patients, and even to give financial incentives for participating physicians.