Q&A: HealthMobile App Gets Professional Endorsement From Nigerian Doctors

  HealthMobile is Nigeria's first global healthcare app. HealthNewsNG.com spoke to its developers about the app, its development and the innovative hospital locator feature among other issues.



About Developers

Joshua Ihejiamaizu is an entrepreneur, designer (web, graphics, UI/UX) and innovator who has initiated and run several ICT-based community projects at the Federal University of Technology Owerri where he is currently studying Electrical Electronic Engineering. He shares a strong passion for IT, writing and tech-related innovation.

Johnson Okorie is a cross-platform programmer and developer with vast experience and skill set in the .NET framework (Visual Basic, C#, ASP.NET, and XNA), Database management systems (MySQL), C++ and Java for Blackberry and Android development. He also studies Electrical Electronics Engineering at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri.

Focus Areas of the App

HealthMobile provides over 4,000 Health Topics and Information for quick access, Health News focusing on various categories important to the user and delivered by location choice, Food/Diet Information containing over 800,000 recipes for Lifestyle Planning, Hospital Locator Service for finding the nearest hospital around you, Drugs/Supplements information, First Aid Information and videos to accompany.

We are looking to expand each of these data sets and add features that would focus on preventive medicine.

How the Idea Hit

Every big idea starts with a small problem. In our community at FUTO, we observed an outbreak of typhoid amongst students was not easily curtailed because the students were misdiagnosing typhoid for malaria, and hence taking the wrong treatment (self-medication). So, we decided to create a platform that would help users make better informed choices as well as help the local medical center keep track of outbreaks. After brainstorming sessions, we decided to go mobile because it was green, open-source, and wide spread. We could reach everyone by creating a mobile app, and we had the skill to do that. So our project has evolved from a simple app that helps students at FUTO diagnose between Malaria and Typhoid and helps the medical center track emergencies and outbreaks, to the global mobile app that we have today.

Who Can Use the App

Doctors, Patients, Tourists, Emergency Services, (Government) Healthcare Workers, Companies with strong Health and Safety Policies and anybody interested in health topics.

Response So Far

Firstly, we had a good turn-out of doctors at our app launching event in Cross River State. The doctors present pledged their support for the next phase of what we want to achieve. They also made some telling contributions that would certainly be put into place when we ship the first major update to the app.  

Secondly, we have had a good response from users – people seem to like the interface design a lot. Generally though, our app is on about seven app stores (Google, Amazon, Opera, MTN, and AppBrain inclusive) and the response in terms of downloads and like for the idea has been great.

Categories of Doctors involved in Development

We work closely with resident doctors due in part to their less busy schedule but also because they are generally more receptive to the idea of technology in healthcare delivery, than their more established counterparts. For most of our data though, we work with trusted sources mostly based in the United States.

Updates for the Future

The future looks exciting but it all depends on the funding opportunities that come our way.

1  We are already working the Exercise & Fitness and Health Index Calculator sections of the Lifestyle Planning tools widget. What we want to do is recommend food & diet plans and exercise & fitness plans s for users, using results from the user’s health index calculations (such as BMI). So we can tell you how many calories you can lose by doing say 30minutes of a particular exercise. This is based on medical ‘best practices’ of preventive medicine and our doctors are well behind us in this aspect.

2    We want to create our own web service so we can be less reliant on Google for our health news. Our web service will also allow us collect user-generated content from our doctors to improve the content and capacity our database of drugs/supplements, health topics and food recipes. This would then ultimately allow us to develop the ‘Symptom Checker’ widget, a tool we removed from this version due to data reliability issues. Each of these updates will take a short time to implement once the funding is available, expect of course the Symptom Checker, which will take much more time to build the kind of database that we want.

Business Model

Part of what our web service will do is to create a unique advertising system that would allow healthcare product advertisers to reach users based on the user’s interest as determined by an algorithm in the app.

Also we care looking to use HealthMobile as a prototype to create custom apps for Companies looking to foster strong Health & Safety Practices, UN and government healthcare parastatals and individual communities with specific healthcare needs.

Endorsement

Yes, at our app launching event, doctors from the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital gave officially approved the standards that we had used in creating HealthMobile.

How Hospital Locator Works

Simply tap the ‘Use Current Location’ widget or enter your location in the space provided. The app uses Google Mops to find the nearest hospitals and displays in-app. By selecting a particular hospital and tapping the Ambulance icon, you will get driving directions from your current location.