Social Impact Project for Health tech Product Development: Mobile/ Web Applications and APIs - SAP Germany

Project Description and Impact

In 2023, I nearly lost my mother during a late-night medical emergency. When I was called from my room, I was informed "Mum is not consious". Every one was panicking but instead of seeking medical help, they proceeded to pray. I was called to join in on the prayer but chose to call the ambulance and look for any frst aid information I could get online and from her personal doctor. Unfortunately the Ambulance arrived 2 hours later, the doctor could not be reached, and I didn't know exactly what information to search for becuase i didn't know what her issue was yet. Her personal doctor's hospital didn't have ambulance services so the ambulance took us to it's affiliated hospital. Upon arrival, she was administered drugs she was allergic too which put her on life support for two days all because the doctors could not access a medical history profile. In that moment I realized how dangerous fragmentation of health services, information and medical history is.

And this is a challenge that affects millions of others. In Africa where the highest disease burden in the world is realised, access to healthcare is still a challenge. Why? Because first, the doctor to patient ratio is very poor at 1:10000, patients spend 4-7hrs travelling and waiting to see a physician. and health records are fragmented due to 80% of facilities being paperbased and those with digital solutions lacking data sharing. This leads to delays in diagnosis, medical errors and avoidable deaths.

Since January 2024, we have been working on this solution. While it started out solely to aggregate medical records, our feedback after launching has caused us to continuously pivot into a product that solves the key pain points of the patients and health care ecosystem players. Those pivots have been very instrumental in improving traction, visibility and engagement of the platform. However these same pivots have also increased the complexity of the platform.

The organization needs support because our resources are very low and only enough to afford two software developers that are fresh out of Universtiy. They have been very instrumental in building an MVP and helping us get the feedback we need however their speed in execution of the product development is very slow which affects our ability to fail fast, learn fast and scale fast. Getting support in software development will help us greatly because our organization's very foundation is technology, so without it working the way it is supposed to, we will be unable to deliver the impact we hope to.

Learning Opportunity

Volunteering with MyMedikoz gives the experteer a hands-on experience of building a health tech startup in the African context. The Experteer will:

Understand the challenges and opportunities unique to healthcareand product development in Africa, and explore strategies to mitigate barriers or leverage local strengths.
Grow personally, witnessing firsthand the impact of their work on improving access to healthcare and mindset change through implementation and research.
Strengths and weaknesses of working with teams in Africa and how to improve collaboration for future projects