casenote
Why
-
The lack of continuity in clinical care when patients change hospitals or care providers increases the expenditure on their care and the risk of medical errors from inadequate history. This situation has attendant existential and economic costs
-
I witnessed a scenario where a patient almost lost her life after ingesting various classes of antihypertensives prescribed by physicians in different settings. They were unaware of her medical profile and could not obtain adequate history due to a language barrier
​
What
casenote is a secure, cloud-based patient-centric Electronic Medical Records platform designed to enable continuity of care across a network of care providers.
​
How
I polled a few of my patients, colleagues, and health administrators on my network to determine if this was a pain point. The feedback was positive. Further, my reality as a practising physician made it easy to empathize with patients.
Then I named the project casenote, a reference to the traditional paper version and began tinkering with ideas to bring it to life. I sketched the layout of a multi-nodal network on a notepad; each node represented care provider touchpoints, the edges were the flow of information between them.
Afterwards, I made rough drafts of how the nodes would appear on different portals, then set off to build the prototype using HTML, CSS, and WordPress for the frontend, and PHP for the backend. I also employed two programmers to build the platform with me (Dami Soyemi was highly instrumental in the project).
At an advanced stage of the project, we added two marketers to the team and subsequently tested the platform on five hospitals with an average footfall of 15 patient visits per day. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Riding on the momentum, we secured a partnership with the Lagos State Government in 2018 to support a health campaign targeting civil servants in the state.
The project enabled remote access to healthcare, reduced medical errors by over 20%, and the cost of accessing care by at least 15%.
​
​
