In Togo, access to healthcare remains unreliable. Additionally, the majority of healthcare centers are remote, making the majority of patients always obtain new health records for each new consultation. With this, the majority of healthcare professionals do not have a continuous insight and follow-up into patients’ health history.
To solve this challenge and limitations, in 2015, Kofiyi Agbetiafa developed an application called ‘Dokita Eyes’ which enables health professionals to keep an eye on their patients all the time, wherever they are.
Patients are required to fill in their personal details online making use of any phone and doctors will later key in all health-related complications of patients. This eventually acts as a reference point to doctors.
Koffivi Agbetiafa, the promoter of Dokita Eyes said “The application itself serves as a health book. It is a digitized health book. The book has been digitized in such a way that there are a lot of related services linked to the solution. For instance, you can order medicines with the application, which is not possible with physical booklets.
A patient does not need to have a smartphone to use the application. Dokita Eyes is a real innovative solution specifically for rural populations and disadvantaged people.
A health worker or relative can create a patient’s digital health record through a phone. Then using a QR code like this one, the patient can access his health booklet that has all his health information on his previous consultation to which his doctor is entitled to thanks to the alerts.
This has revolutionized the healthcare system in Togo and over 80,000 people have subscribed to the application in the entire country.
“Today we have been able to create nearly eighty thousand health booklets, both for pregnant women and children under five years of age. So this solution in remote areas allows the community health worker to regularly visit the pregnant woman, to take the vital parameters regularly and to document their health booklet from the community and send these data to the head nurse of the post in the peripheral care unit or to the midwife in the unit,” Koffivi Agbetiafa, the promoter Dokita Eyes said.
The application has been in use for 6 years and currently in its third version. o improve its functionality, regular updates are being made. The aim of the developer is to serve many users and protect user data.
