DigiHealth Mobile

Changing the face of health care data management in East and Central Africa.

In Uganda, 84.4% of the population live in the rural part of the country yet most of the hospitals are built in the urban centres. This leaves a majority of our population with limited access to quality health care. In order to compensate for this, the government and non-profit organisations organise community outreach health camps regularly to ensure that the under-served portion of the population can also have access to health care services. This community outreach program is a vital part of our healthcare system yet the biggest challenge faced by the health workers who are tasked with carrying it out is the lack of a proper patient data collection and storage infrastructure. Currently, the medical teams that conduct medical outreach in the community record patient information in large books which are sometimes lost or damaged over time. This loss of data makes it difficult for the hospitals and the government to plan accurately for the drugs and equipment to be used by the community health workers. This in turn hinders proper planning by the health facility and the ministry of health who are the custodians of all health related information. At the end of the month, the community health workers are also required to compile a report using the information in the many books used during the month and submit it to the ministry of health. This is quite a tedious task because they have to manually look through a number of books and during this process, mistakes in data entry are made.

Our solution, DigiHealth Mobile, is a mobile application that digitizes the process of data collection by community outreach health workers. With our app, they simply go into the field with a smart mobile device and collect patient data with instant access to patient history at the click of a button. This data is then automatically sent to the hospital dashboard where a report is generated. We built it to work offline because most of the health camps are conducted in remote areas without internet access. With this app, we are easing the work of the doctors, ensuring the health data collected is accurate, secure and accessible and at the same time availing decision makers with reliable reports and statistics for informed planning and resource allocation.

DigiHealth Mobile is innovative because it is improving on open source data collection software and improving it's capabilities to fit the health sector. Our target clients majorly operate in rural areasa where internet access is still difficult therefore we designed it to collect and save data without internet access. It can also integrate with the existing hospital databases making it easy for clients to transfer the data they collect while in the field. We also have an advanced dashboard that can generate visualised reports to aid the health facilities in producing accurate statistics out of the patient data collected.

Technology is not only integral to our solution, it is our solution. The solution we are presenting is a mobile and web application to digitize data collection for healthcare providers.

Over the next 12 months our goal is to train health care providers in the user of smart devices for data collection. In addition to this, we will be deploying DigiHealth mobile in a minimum of 20 health facilities, this is to ensure digitization of health data so that we can build a database of aggregated patient data to aid the government and other philanthropic organisations in decision making and resource allocation.

Over the next three to five years, not only will we be scaling our reach to cover East and Central Africa but we will also be adding features to our system in order to create more impact. In addition to the app, we will also build a data aggregation platform to integrate information collected in the various hospital systems. this will make it easy for hospitals to project disease outbreaks and allocation medication as required.

Our customers are hospitals, clinics and humanitarian organisations that conduct community health camps. We reach them through our aggressive marketing strategy that includes attending health summits/conferences and personally visiting potential at their premises to pitch our solution to them. We also use mainstream media and social media to advertise our services and reach our customers.

Currently we have 4 hospitals where we are piloting our app. This presents us with a total of 209 users. The users are the healthcare providers who conduct the community health camps. They are using DigiHealth Mobile to collect patient information while in the field in the place of the books they were previously using. With this tool they are now able to efficiently and accurately collect patient information, have access to patient history while in the field, generate instant reports and schedule follow-up appointments for patients.

The digiHealth team comprises of 7 members in total. The skills represented are: Software development, Marketing, Business development, financial management, communications, project planning and proposal writing/presentation. We have 2 software developers, 1 of whom is a user interface designer. We also have 3 people who handle marketing and communications/social media. Our CEO specializes in business development, project planning and proposal writing/presentation therefore she handles these tasks with the guidance of our mentors. One other team member handles the company’s financial aspect.

We are using a subscription business model. We make money by charging the health facilities who use our platform an annual subscription fee based on the number of users in the facility. When we are deploying the system to a client, we charge them an installation fee and if the users require training to use the platform, we charge the facility a fee to conduct the user training. This is how we make money. We also conduct basic IT trainings for health workers where we charge a fee to the attendees. We are positioned for long term sustainability because health data is a growing field and the need for digitized tools to fulfill the need is growing each year.

Solve presents an opportunity for me to showcase my innovation, DigiHealth Mobile to investors, ideators and key players in the business community from all over the world who can assist me in scaling up. I will get constructive criticism in order to identify the shortcomings so as to improve the app making it applicable in all parts of Africa. I’ll also be able to share my experience as an entrepreneur in a growing economy and the lessons I have learnt so as to inspire the upcoming entrepreneurs and help them avoid potential landmines they might encounter.