Doro Health Service

Doro health service facilitates healthcare, medication, doctors, blood donors and authentic health information access to underserved patients and communities in Cameroon. 

Accessing healthcare service, authentic medication, doctors, blood donors, and the constant loss of health records have for over the past few years been a major problem to most patients in my community and Cameroon as a whole. A study shows that 7 out of 10 people in my community and most rural areas of Cameroon suffers from these problems. Recently, the government and some organizations have been trying their best to solve these problems, but they still persists. Speaking to some patients in September, 2022 at Regional Hospital Bamenda, many expressed anger and frustration as they traveled from their villages to The Regional Hospital of Bamenda for medical consultation and upon arrival they found out that the doctor whom they came to see had traveled. As a result, they ended up not being attended to.

Another problem faced by patients in my region is the issue of fake medication. According to a WHO's report published in 2019, Cameroonians were warned of the circulation of fake hypertension drugs that had been found to contain glibenclamide instead of hydrochlorothiazide, with adverse effects reported for patients who took them. This alert came at a time the Cameroon customs officers had just seized thousands of drugs of questionable quality. This issue of fake medication remains one of the major problems faced by individuals in my region and Africa at large.

Also, most patients in Cameroon still uses notebooks for hospital consultations and medical record storage. Most of these patients oftentimes misplace these notebooks which makes it difficult to some medical personnel to make use of past data so as to administer treatments. This creates problems as some doctors end up giving drugs to patients who are allergic to it.

Lastly, blood shortages is acute in my country and just half of the blood needed for transfusion each year in the African region is collected, leaving many facing life-threatening shortages. Of the 196,000 women who die each year in sub-Saharan Africa, a third die from bleeding. Most of these deaths can be avoided by timely availability of blood.(source: afro.who.int/news/). This blood shortage results largely because willful donors are hard to find.

Doro health service is an application designed to:

- Facilitate health care, blood donors, doctors and authentic medication access to underserved patients and communities in Cameroon.

- Enable patients book and schedule appointments with doctors so that they can visit the hospital at a time there are sure of meeting with the doctor.

- Facilitate hospital consultation by introducing a virtual means of consultation which helps patients who are in remote areas to get consulted without necessarily having to travel or trek for kilometers to the hospital.

- Aid patients to store their medical records electronically to avoid the loss of data. This helps patients get their medical records handy with them wherever they go.

- Help patients to easily contact medical personnel and emergency units during emergencies.

- Help hospitals and health care facilities improve the quality of health care services, reduce operation costs and improve the revenue cycle.

Our solution serves patients living in rural communities of Cameroon with little or no access to healthcare services. Individuals living in the communities which we are targeting are underserved as they have to travel for long distances before there are able to access hospitals, medication and doctors. Our solution addresses their needs as they are able to get consulted virtually from their home without necessarily needing to travel to the hospital. This helps to reduce their expenditure and impact their life positively by improving their living standard.

My team is made up of committed persons from diverse backgrounds and we are consolidating our diversity and efforts towards social change. We are driven by our believe to tailor technology-based solutions to global problems. My team is in the best position to deliver this solution due to the experiences and skills we have acquired over the years through work and volunteer engagement. The six active members of the team at Doro Health Service are Sama Lesly Tankfu, Dr. Nouny Armand, Dzebam Godlove,  Mildred Ngenseh,   Bonjoh Thank-God Rinwi and Kanjoh Marcus.

Sama Lesly Tankfu is an advocate for change, a tech-head and an innovative problem solver. He is the founder of Doro Health Service. He has served as a humanitarian at Draufsicht Bamenda, consolidating his effort to foster healthcare access and global education through youth and community-led engagements. In 2020, he served as a volunteer at the Bamenda Regional Delegation of public health where he actively participated in the promotion of health campaigns aimed at mitigating pandemics and serving the vulnerable.  He also serves as a Global Youth Ambassador at Theirworld where he acts as a campaigner for social justice and the right to education. 

Dr. Nouny Armand is a medical doctor with over 6 years of experience in the medical field. He serves as Chief Information Officer at Doro Health Services and has served at Nwa health district and currently serving at Ndu Hospital.

Dzebam Godlove is the director of Draufsicht-Bamenda, a Non Governmental Organization aimed to foster global education and health. He serve as the human resource manager and researcher at Doro health service.

Mildred Ngenseh is the co-founder of Doro health service and founder of SMN Media, a startup aimed at empowering young women in media technology while creating audio-visual contents. She serves as the project manager at Doro health service. In 2020, she coordinated the installation of 15 hand wash stations in some communities in Bamenda in order to support them fight the spread of COVID-19.

Bonjoh Thank-God Rinwi is a medical student. He has worked as a volunteer at the Bamenda Regional Hospital where he helped to record medical history and symptoms, minister medications and treatments, perform diagnostic tests and actively participated in campaigns on how to curb the spread of Neglected Tropical Diseases and Coronavirus.

Kanjoh Marcus is a fullstack developer with over 6 years experience and serves as Chief Technical Officer and product development manager at Doro health service.

We have conducted several research studies in order to better understand the need of the population we are serving. In September, 2022, we interviewed some patients at Regional Hospital Bamenda, many expressed anger and frustration as they traveled from their villages to The Regional Hospital of Bamenda for medical consultation and upon arrival they found out that the doctor whom they came to see had travelled.

Also, in January, 2023 during our research study assessing the challenges faced by patients before accessing hospitals, doctors and healthcare services, we came across heartbreaking situations such as that of a patient X  (name withheld) who is suffering from a heart condition that requires her to seek medical care from a specialist every month recounted the challenges she faces every month before seeing the specialist. She said she travels a distance of approximately 135km every month to the region where the specialist works. That most often, she goes to the hospital and discover that the specialist is not on seat. This causes her to miss most of her sessions and her health condition  keeps deteriorating. When we introduced our solution to her, she was filled with so much joy and said  the application will greatly help her as she will be able to book an appointment with her specialist before travelling so that she would be sure of meeting the specialist on seat.

Our solution improves the approach to the problem of constant health record lossage in my region as most hospitals and patients still uses notebooks for medical record storage. Most patients oftentimes misplace these notebooks which makes it difficult for doctors to make use of past data so as to administer treatments. This creates problems as some doctors end up giving drugs to patients who are allergic to it. 

Also,  the introduction of virtual consultation and chat features provides a new approach whereby patients can get consulted with any doctor or specialist in the nation regardless of their location. This helps doctors to keep in touch and monitor their patients from wherever there are.

Our impact goals for the coming years at Doro Health Service is to significantly:

- Mitigate death rate in rural communities in Cameroon which is caused by inaccessibility of healthcare, medication, blood donors and doctors. We hope to achieve this by bridging the large gap that exists between patients and healthcare facilities and also make doctors, first aid care givers and emergency units readily available during emergencies such as birth and accidents.

- Improve individual’s health and living standard: this will be achieved through the connections we will create with hospitals and doctors that will permit all individuals to have equal access to healthcare services irrespective of their financial status. Also, we hope to reduce patient’s hospital expenditure and by doing so, their living standard will be improved.

- Create jobs: the execution of Doro health service will lead to job creation as they will be openings for developers,marketing agents, volunteers and so on. This will help to curb unemployment.

The core technology that powers our solution is cloud computing: which is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Our solution is currently in the testing phase with 55+ people involved in the process. We aim to reach out to 2,500+ patients and 5+ communities one year after launch.

The barriers that we are currently facing towards achieving our next year goals are:

- Fears from users over their data privacy.

- Inadequate finance to hire the services of developers and promote our product so as to reach out to our targeted population, and get our project registered.

- Poor internet service availability.

• Dubai International Financial Center (Prototypes for Humanity)- we are working with them to connect with relevant industry partners to accelerate technology validation and development.
• ALX Africa- we are working with them to build and validate our business model.
• Microsoft for Startups- we are working with them to connect with experts and mentors for guidance across a range of startup challenges.

For our revenue model, we deduct a 20% commission from every successful virtual consultation carried out on our platform and also charge patients $1 for our medical records storage service after every 20 pages intervals; this price is an equivalent of the price of a 20 leaves notebook currently being used for medical record storage. We also charge a $3 fee for each blood donor we make available to a patient.

We will bring in the money we need to fund our work through revenue generated from our services rendered, grants and raising investment capital.