[column] Dr. Kevin Muragaijimana MD: A need for Artificial Intelligence-based company in Africa Health sector

Access to quality healthcare in low-income countries is impacted by many various factors. For example: In sub-Saharan Africa, the average number of physicians per 1000 per capita is 0.2 compared to Italy for example which has

8.0 doctors for a 1000 population. In Rwanda, while a big number of medical doctors are General Practitioners who are available in every district of the country, Radiologists who are medical specialists supposed to detect breast cancers (and other abnormalities in medical images) are number less than 20 per 13 million population in Rwanda, 50 per 45 million population in Uganda, 80 per 32 million population in Ghana, and soon. With available data, we can agree that you have to be in a very special condition (which mostly means very ill) for you to meet a radiologist, and in such scenarios, detecting breast cancer doesn't change the fate.

 Secondly, In the US, Medical errors are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer despite being among countries with advanced medicine. More than one-third, or 34%, of American physicians, have been sued over allegations of medical malpractice, according to a

2016 American Medical Association survey and nearly half of those (16.8%) have faced two or more lawsuits. 32% of malpractice suits related to medication involve patient death, and 18% (nearly 1 in 5) of all other cases do. Most of these doctors claim to have made human mistakes. I think it’s time to accept that errors will happen.

Doctors are human and the systems they work in are not infallible. As a society, we must decide whether we wish to punish and blame those who dedicate their lives to helping others, or to ensure that we create an open and supportive environment where both patients and doctors feel safe.

HealthTech and Artificial Intelligence-based company had a solution to many of challenges doctors are facing, of using artificial intelligence or in other words providing a third hand to healthcare providers and help them reduce mortality and morbidity associated with medical errors and inaccessibility to some medical specialists as number still high in Africa. 

COVID-19 also revealed the need to improve in our infrastructure technology in which Health sector should be priotozed. The pandemic has affected the development of so many countries in campany as well as companies for sure, we can’t deny it.  But it has expanded our philosophy and our mission in incorporating our services and products which are all digital, we believe that our customers who are lambda people, doctors, and pharmacists won’t be distracted by the pandemic in order to access our services.

Working from home has changed our way of work certainly, and we tried to cope with that shifting from office meetings to teleconferencing, more memos than before among the staff.

Worldwide, the healthcare system is an old institution that has resised to modernization for years and years. The current challenges facing the modernization of healthcare services are the availability, and adoption of modernized programs or solutions.

As young Africans we decided to be part of the solution by designing a web version of the app which will see us functioning not only on smartphones but also on computers and other medical devices. Having a functioning web version of DoctorAI will enable us to deal with many different health institutions: mainly hospitals and medical device manufacturing companies.

Dr. Kevin Muragaijimana MD is Medical Doctor, Founder and CEO at DoctorAI, Coordinating Medical Consultant at AFRI-ONC.

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