DocTap

A mobile technology-enabled remote diagnosis and consultation solution

DocTap is a mission-critical, gap-filling App built to provide an impeccable medical experience from one-on-one consultancy, referral to professional medical practitioners, provision of factual second opinion from experts about any medical diagnosis, general health information and of course 24hours response to health-related issues.

The key challenges to be solved by this application include:

• Medical quackery/clinical errors - This has resulted in misdiagnosis and death of many Africans
• Brain drain - A poll conducted by NOI polls and Nigeria Health Watch in 2017 found that 88 percent — almost nine in 10 — Nigerian doctors were actively seeking an opportunity to go abroad to practice
• Poor patient to Doctor ratio - Available world bank data shows a ratio of 2,500 patients per Doctor, compared to Cuba's impressive 170
• Poor health-seeking behaviour - resulting in self-medication, late presentation of ailments and reluctance to visit qualified health care providers
• Stigmatisation - Certain individuals do not want to be known to have certain ailments
• Lack of clinical acumen - People around sick relatives and friends often do not know what to do in the event of an emergency
• Affordability of tertiary health facilities

We have therefore proposed a solution that provides fast, discrete and direct access to trained medical professionals from the comfort of one's office or home. The proposed solution is built to provide access to physicians in the developed world who will be equipped to provide second opinion on treatments, evidence-based diagnosis and real time interaction with patients through the inbuilt video and audio callers. Other proposed benefits include:

• Gatekeeping to screen cases before hospital referrals
• Obtaining a second opinion on cases to prevent misdiagnosis
• Preventing self-medication
• Ensuring access to quality and convenient healthcare
• Disease case-finding and spotting
• Access to expertise not available within a locality (bring back the drained brains!)

Key functions enabled by the state of the art model of the app include:

• Remote diagnosis
• Issuance of prescriptions
• Providing referrals to specialists
• Arranging lab tests and scans
• Writing medical letters
• Offering medical advice

With the proposed solution, the largest hospital will be the borderless mobile world. 

The solution is a new application of mobile technology and brings together the total health value chain, comprising test and diagnostic centers, specialists and medical stores. The design consideration is to see how to use mobile telephony in solving as many of the challenges identified, as possible.

The solution will work on mobile devices on both demand and supply sides. With the number of mobile users reaching new highs in Nigeria and the rest of Africa, coupled with enhanced affordability and availability of data, there is ample opportunity for wider reach and scaling up.

Over the next 12 months, we want to deploy the solution fully in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone consideration came out of the need to strengthen post-Ebola capacity and confidence in the health system. We estimate that there will be about 50,000 users of the solution.

We have engaged the services of a digital marketing company (Civiza Limited) to work on activation and social mobilisation. We hope to achieve a mobile download of over 1 million and active use of over 500,000 every quarter. We have also developed a model to categorise specialists into bands to make the services affordable to rural communities. Part of funds received will be utilised to build Telemedicine experience centres for rural hospitals, with a view to providing them with access to seasoned specialists on complex cases.

The solution will be deployed on Google Store and IOS market for users to download. The services will be available over users mobile devices.

The beta release (QA phase) served 121 people in one day. The comments and learning points are being used to fine tune the solution prior to full release. We have therefore taken the solution back to production to refine.

We estimate that between 500,000-1m active use will be recorded within the first 12 months of launch. This is a little percentage of the over 18m who have access to mobile devices in Nigeria today. We hope to scale this up and achieve at least 20% incremental growth in both download and active use. On the supply side, we intend to expand the specialist network to India and Dubai (health city).

Information Technology

Health Management

Marketing (Digital and Branding)

Monitoring and Evaluation

Health Financing

The identified framework for revenue generation is based on a percentage of patients' payments to Doctors. We also intend to raise revenue through the 'Lounge' page - an information and marketing page for drug stores and health product vendors/service providers.

The model is, in all material respect, similar to the Uber model which depends on volume.

Solve's ability to support for transformational change is the key motivation for this application. We also believe that our efforts can be enhanced by Solve's connection and mentorship

The key barriers include:

• Data availability
• Push back from local specialists
• Quick adoption

Solve can assist by providing organisation and IT mentorship for the DocTap team