From finance to healthcare frontlines: How Rebecca White built a system to fix hospital referrals
Rebecca White, who has created a system to fix fatal ambulance delays and referrals.
What you need to know:
- A failed hospital referral inspired this young innovator to build a system that could prevent similar tragedies.
- Blending finance and artificial intelligence, she is rethinking how hospitals communicate during life-or-death emergencies.
Rebecca White still recalls the moment that reshaped how she viewed hospital systems. During her internship at Kisumu County Referral Hospital in 2025, a friend shared a painful story: Her aunt had died after a referral went wrong.
She had been transferred by ambulance, but by the time she reached the receiving hospital, crucial details about her condition and medication were missing. She was given the wrong treatment. “That really pushed me,” Rebecca says. “If the system can help the receiving hospital know every detail about the patient, it can save lives.”
Rebecca never went to school, imagining hospital corridors. Yet as a child, a book about Ben Carson once sparked a brief dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, a dream that shifted during her time at Alliance Girls’ High School. Here, conversations among students often revolved around their fathers working in banks. She began to ask different questions: “How do people make money? How do they invest?”
That curiosity led her into finance. With an A minus, she joined the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology to study financial engineering, graduating in December last year. In June 2025, soon after completing her final exam, she came across an opportunity shared in a WhatsApp group.
This was about training in artificial intelligence and data science for public health, offered through the University of Nairobi’s Institute for Tropical and Infectious Diseases in collaboration with partners. She applied and was selected. “The training made me start thinking outside the box,” she says.
That mindset met a real-world challenge during her six-week internship. At the Kisumu County Referral Hospital, she was placed in the emergency and operations department, which manages ambulance dispatch. There, she quickly noticed systemic delays. “There were delays in dispatching ambulances from one hospital to another,” she says. “It led to loss of lives, wasted time, and the system was simply inefficient.”
Her finance background sharpened her perspective further. Beyond delays, she saw gaps in financial tracking, no clear system for monitoring fuel use or planning budgets based on historical data. So she built a solution.
Her system allows a nurse making a referral to log into a platform and enter patient details: medical history, medication given, and current condition. Once submitted, notifications are automatically sent to both the ambulance driver and the receiving hospital.
By the time the patient arrives, the receiving facility already has full information. “It avoids confusion,” she explains. “They already know what medication the patient has been given and their condition.”
Real-time tracking
The system also tracks ambulances in real time, helping identify delays and suggest alternative routes when traffic is heavy. In addition, it calculates distances between facilities, estimates fuel consumption, and uses historical data to support budgeting and planning. “Everything is in the system,” she says. “You can use past data to project future costs.”
She developed the system in six weeks during her internship, working daily at the hospital using her laptop and available Wi-Fi. With access to hospital data, she built it at no cost. Despite its potential, the system has not yet been implemented.
Rebecca presented it to officials from the Kisumu County Department of Health last December. They expressed interest and promised to follow up. She is still waiting. For now, the system remains unpiloted, partly because of funding needs for hosting and deployment. She is open to exploring other facilities, especially private hospitals.
Outside this project, Rebecca’s interest in finance continues to evolve. She is now volunteering as a finance analyst at a nongovernmental organisation in Nairobi. She is also working on a new idea focused on non-performing loans, aimed at improving cooperation between banks and borrowers. “From the training, I learnt that as long as there is a problem, you can observe it and come up with a solution, and I’m creating the solution,” she says.
