Monitrack

Due to an ineffective disease reporting system, it has become difficult to collect data on disease patterns in the community hence making data-guided decision making difficult.

As medical doctors in a primary care hospital, we notice changes in disease patterns in the community but our history is collected on paper and disease surveillance is ineffective. At last quarter of 2019, we noticed a wave of febrile medical condition which was occasionally associated with some upper respiratory symptoms which almost overwhelmed our hospital. This pattern was noticed across different hospitals in Lagos state but we did not have a system that monitors these patterns.

Similarly, when COVID 19 was labelled a pandemic 2020, we noticed certain disease patterns before we saw these things in publications. For example, we noticed that some a strong association between COVID and hyperglycaemia or COVID and vertigo before we saw journals written about them. And all the waves of infection that were announced were usually noticed a week or two before we hear the announcement that there is a wave. We notice these waves by seeing an uptick in the symptoms patients were presenting with.

If we want to be able to prevent future pandemics, it is imperative that we have a system that detects change in disease patterns early. Especially, viral infections so action can be taken.

A hospital-based symptom checker which also provides clinical decision support (CDS) for healthcare workers. 

These will be a CDS system that would help with task-shifting by guiding non-physician healthcare workers in history taking and guiding on diagnosis and treatment. This will help with the doctor shortage problem and help patients get standardised care. Also this system will help doctors work faster as their history would have been taken already.

However, an added benefit of this would be that patients presenting complaints are collected in a systematic way and patterns of diseases can me monitored. These patterns can then be tracked on dashboards by ministries of health.

This system would work offline and sync the data when there is internet.

Primary health centers that deliver healthcare services to urban poor and rural communities

small private hospitals 

General hospitals

We are positioned for this because we experience these problems daily. I work as a medical officer and the problems are not remote. We have a deep understanding of the culture and the challenges that healthcare workers face in these communities. 

We understand the limitations of the resources and the skills of the people who would be impacted by this solution.

There is a lot of competition for tech talents and hence available talents are very expensive. I am applying because this can afford me the opportunity to hire the right talents in the building of this solution. 

This can be funded by subscriptions by the hospital for the clinical decision support. Also organisations and governments can pay for the insights from this data.