A mission healthcare facility in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Save-a-Life Mission Hospital, has launched a healthcare application designed to improve life expectancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality and help curb medical tourism in Nigeria.

The application, known as “MyHomeClinic”, is designed to provide real-time medical assistance during emergencies, facilitate rural telemedicine and enable timely monitoring of patients’ treatment outcomes.

The Founder and Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Richard Okoye, disclosed this while speaking with reporters, describing the application as accessible, efficient and affordable.

Okoye described Nigeria’s life expectancy index as a healthcare crisis, which he likened to a “tsunami”, but expressed optimism that the application would help improve the situation by ensuring prompt medical attention for emergency cases.

“If there is an emergency, a signal would be sent and doctors would converge from across the world to look at the situation and come up with a prompt solution almost immediately to arrest the situation,” he said.

He said the application could also provide additional support to medical personnel attending to women in labour.

“Even when a woman is in labour in the hospital, and a doctor and other medical officers are on ground to attend to her, other doctors can be contacted via the app dashboard to join the labour room to ensure that no woman ever dies again while trying to birth a child,” Okoye said.

“Today I can be here to be able to support local community men and women in those localities, those centres where there is no power, nor internet with satellite Star link.

“Also in Save-a-Life we have been able to put up that digitalization in full, every patient in this hospital is being monitored by us, we know what is happening to them by minute, per second and hour, if anybody walks into this facility and take a BP check, instantly the reading is uploaded for attention where necessary.

“Myhomeclinic app we built is designed in such a way that people can book appointments from home if they want to come to the hospital to see a doctor or stay at home if they want to consult themselves, by simply responding to questions posed on them by the system based on the complaints they made there.

“The questions are what the doctor would ask them if they had visited the hospital physically, the moment the responses are submitted, the answers will come in the language of a doctor for proper diagnosis.” he said.

Explaining the reason for designing the Myhomeclinic, the CMD said it was designed to make Doctor/ patients consultation easy, in the local language the patient prefers and from a relaxed and more comfortable space that would help them remember and provide necessary information that would help for proper diagnosis.

“We designed the App because, most times people will walk into a doctor’s office and forget some important information that can help a doctor make a proper diagnosis, sometimes a doctor for some reasons may forget some important questions to ask which can lead to mistakes in patients diagnosis.” Okoye explained.

He said, “Apart from making patient/doctor consultation easy and comfortable, the system would equally help the doctor know the right drugs to prescribe for the case, thereby eliminating doctors errors that could lead to complications in the patient or even death.

“The app also gives patients the opportunity to take their consultation in their local languages, particularly, Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa.

According to him, with Myhomeclinic patients can meet with doctors across the globe to brainstorm on the challenge and come up with the best and most effective diagnosis and treatment. (The Nation)