The project
Overview
South Africa has an enormous shortage of dermatologists (doctors
specialising in skin, nail, and hair conditions). The country
has a population of nearly 60 million with less than 200
dermatologists available countrywide — that's 300 000
people for every dermatologist.
These dermatologists are usually found in city centres, with
some provinces having no dermatologists available, leaving
millions of people in rural areas without a way to see a
dermatologist in person. To help solve this problem we founded
Dr Derma, a medical-grade online dermatology platform.
Description
Dr Derma is built on a simple idea — improve access to
dermatology. Dermatologists, however, are already fully booked
months in advance so we needed to create a platform that is both
easy to use, compliant, and very efficient in diagnosing and
treating common conditions like acne.
To solve these problems, we implemented the following:
- Patients
For patients, we developed a custom chat interface that guides
them through the process of collecting personal and medical
information after which we present them with a series of
questions to help the dermatologist diagnose the condition. They
also provide a few photos or a video of the affected area.
- Dermatologists
On the dermatologist side, we provide a specialised fullscreen
"diagnosis mode" with all the information about a patient in one
place. We also provide shortcuts to treatments they previously
specified for specific conditions to improve the efficiency of
the platform. Voicenotes and messages can also be included in
the diagnosis to make the whole process still feel personal.
It's a simple service built mainly in
PHP using
the
Yii Framework
with
jQuery for
the chat interface. It runs in a
Docker
container on
Azure App Service
and has had almost zero downtime in the past 2+ years. The
solution here doesn't lie in complicated tech and app downloads
but rather in simplicity catering for those that need it most.
