Cape Town born Dr Yaseen Khan from the Open Medicine Project South Africa (TOMPSA) is slowly attracting global recognition for his innovation in combining the medical and technological fields, in a bid to improve the overall state of healthcare in South Africa and other low resource settings. The project has seen a group of healthcare workers collaborate with tech developers and designers, for the development of several mobile applications solely focused on provide faster information to nurses and doctors.

At the heart of the project is the group’s goal to improve the overall care of patients in areas where resources are limited. The technology helps get relevant info and guidelines to doctors across the country, so as to help improve the care of their respective patients.

“This is really to improve the clinical decision making of healthcare workers on the ground,” project co-founder and director, Dr Yaseen Khan told VOC Breakfast Beat on Wednesday.

He stressed the importance on the part of doctors to have access to the correct information about how to treat and manage different patients according to their setting, whether it be public or private.

“You speak to any doctor or nurse that works in these settings and they will tell you, we have very specific management policies and protocols. That’s because we have certain drugs that are available to us, we have a certain burdens of disease, and we have certain ways of managing our patients,” he explained, adding that doctors were making the best of the facilities available to them.

He had praise for those developers and designers who collaborated on the project, in particular their enthusiasm and passion to create a technology that would be beneficial to the wellbeing of people across the country. And despite the group’s efforts to in translating the medical content into the form of a mobile app, this was not something that could not be duplicated or replicated by others.

The app has gained international recognition at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona; an annual event held to show off the latest developments and innovations in the mobile sector. In the Catalonian capital the group walked away with the Global Big Impact Award, as a result of an app developed to assist nurses whilst in an ER room.

“If you look at a very busy ER room, it is very important you find out quickly who is sick and who is not, and this app does that very accurately,” he explained, expressing his gratitude for the prestigious recognition.
TOMPSA’s various apps can be downloaded on Android via the Google Play Store, as well as the Apple App Store. VOC (Mubeen Banderker)