“i’m a clinical officer… i work as a clinician, a general clinician and also a public health practitioner… mostly in urban and peri-urban private clinics and under-resourced settings.” dr. martin muthare
17 years on the ground, martin has run hiv programs, built spreadsheets to track cohorts, and still fights the same three dragons every shift: missing diagnostics, missing records, and missing time.
| problem signal | direct quote |
|---|---|
| no timely diagnostics | “you’ll be required to just treat empirically… if you require a test it will take you… six hours or a day… some tests even two weeks… a month because of queues.” |
| lost patient history | “patients are highly mobile… you wouldn’t know what this patient received in a different facility.” |
| follow-up collapse | “since you didn’t have contact information… high mobility… that poses a very significant challenge of follow-up.” |
| long queues & stock-outs | “long queues and drug stock-outs… impact on the care quality.” |
| data-sharing fear | “anything that tries to make the facilities become interconnected… is normally met with a lot of opposition.” |
external context backs him up:
| # | problem statement | why now | user signal |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. 20-minute labs anywhere | peri-urban clinics lack point-of-care analyzers that hit <30 min TAT for hiv viral load, malaria, full blood count | portable molecular readers now <$500; ai-assisted image recognition cuts reagent cost | “lack of timely diagnostic support… you send the sample to a different facility.” |
| 2. pocket patient history | clinicians need medication & diagnosis history that travels with the patient, not the facility | sim-based personal data vaults (m-health wallets) run offline; QR sync prevents massive infra | “they never recovered… but you don’t know what was given out there.” |
| 3. queue & stock radar | lack of visibility into neighbour-clinic load causes overflow and stock-outs | simple USSD or WhatsApp bot can broadcast live queue length & drug inventory snapshots | “long queues and drug stock-outs… impact on care quality.” |
| 4. outbreak early-warning feed | clinicians hear about outbreaks on the evening news instead of in-clinic | national dhis2 already houses aggregate alerts; push a geo-filtered rss / webhook to phones | “if you could be having a tool that also gives you information… you’d plan drug stocks faster.” |
| 5. gentle recall engine | chronic patients miss 3-month check-ins; default labels hide real compliance | low-literacy voice + sms reminders tied to outcome-based financing | “a system that tracks and reminds both the clinician and the patient… would reduce readmissions.” |