DrRIM: Access to Health Care — Solution Shop
Disruptive technology could make health care more accessible and affordable. Access to health care is one of the major problems Mauritania is facing. It’s hard to get and can cost you a fortune. There’s much room for improvement. The Accelerator Lab in Mauritania is experimenting with disruptive technology to make it easier and cheaper to access health care in Mauritania.
The Lab recently partnered with a local innovator through Hadina RIMTEC (A local incubator) to develop and test an app and a web platform that will facilitate access to help care in Mauritania.
DrRIM is a valuable platform, essentially an infrastructure composed of multiple hospitals and pharmacies each with disruptive, mutually reinforcing business models. Say, a clinic specializes in cardiology, but nobody knows where to find this clinic because there is no national directory of hospitals and clinics. Say, my child is ill at night and I don’t know the closest pediatrician to my house. Say, a recent medical student graduates from university and he opens a small clinic, how will people know about his clinic? Say, a popular dentist or gynecologist that people know very well and everyday his clinic is visited by many people, some patients must wait the whole day to be able to see him/her or some patients must come to the hospital book appointment, go home and then come another day to see the doctor. Say, I moved into a new neighborhood, and I want to find the closest pharmacy to my house, which I don’t really know. Say, I want to know what time to what time will the pharmacy be open. These are the daily realities of must Mauritanians.
DrRIM is built based on a model that is tailored to customer needs: this disruptive technology was implemented through our innovation design thinking session, the process of creatively rethinking the experiment together to ensure it delivers what our target beneficiaries are after.
How DrRIM works
Booking Medical appointments!
Dr RIM is a solution shop — patients can book diagnostic sessions, consultations, and visit with medical practitioners. This helps to take care of unstructured issues with customer services at hospitals. The platform uses a facilitated network model.
First, physicians and doctors can upload the time slots they are available for consultation on the platform, patients can then login and see the availability of doctors and physicians. They can book appointment through the platform and come to the hospital only at the time of their appointment. This process helps to save waiting time of the patients and helps the doctors and physicians to manage their schedules properly. Doctors and patients can also send a one click-push notification to each other for consultation and change of appointment.
Health care providers are now able to innovate in a way that provides patients the efficient, accessible health care that they’re after! Technological enablers like DrRIM are making work simpler and less dependent on human skill. Before this technology, doctors were unable to see what was going on in the reception area and the pain patients go through before consultation. But today, instead of undertaking a time-consuming wait, doctors use this app to publish their available schedule. This process is cheaper, more effective, and even simpler. That’s because technological enablers like DrRIM tackle problems on a smaller scale while cutting costs and the need for human skill.
Pharmacy Location!
The uniqueness of DrRIM is that it focuses also on individual specific situation rather than the general conditions of everyone. The platform also puts together a compilation of pharmacy localizations; patients and ordinary people can login to the app and search for the closest pharmacy to their dwelling. They can also see the opening and closing time of these pharmacies.
Insurance is key to financial stability, as it protects our prosperity against things like exorbitant hospital bills. For instance, health insurance don’t just help people save for medical expenses; they also help them make decisions that generally increase their wealth. This gives people a financial incentive to live healthily. Therefore, DrRIM also encompasses insurance as part of its package. Patients can see which clinic, hospital or pharmacies accepts which type of insurance.
COVID-19 Testing and vaccination centers
The platform also intends to encompass all COVID-19 testing centers and vaccination locations around the country. To help people with fast access and efficient COVID-19 services.
OK, so you understand how DrRIM works, but how could it transform health care?
Disruptive technology
There are many benefits of using DrRiM, the first is a technological enabler, an innovation that simplifies problem-solving, thus making the entire access to health care process cheaper. Its innovation is unique, which allows hospitals to deliver efficient and accessible services. One of the key advantages of DrRIM is that it helps lower access to healthcare cost while making medical services easier and cheaper. In short, we re-examined the needs of our target customers during the testing and improved the product by tailoring it to the needs of customers.
During our experimentation we tested DrRIM in three hospitals in Nouakchott, and various clinics at each face of the testing we collected feedbacks from future users for improvement, before developing the final version which is ready for use.
Finally, the health-care system in Mauritania is dysfunctional and the key to making it work well is creatively disrupting the field. That means providing patients, medical practitioners, and hospitals with a distinct solution such as DrRIM that offer different services. This technology helps by cutting the cost of waiting in lines to see a doctor and visiting to the hospital several times just to have an appointment.
I. Link to the Android Version https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smpnt.doctoRi
II. Link to the App Store Version https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smpnt.doctoRi
III. Link to the Web Version : https://docto-rim.web.app/login-screen
