Ugandan AI Telehealth Platform Co-Founder Advocates for Healthcare Free From Language Barriers
19:00 15.08.2024 (Updated: 19:14 15.08.2024)
© Photo Dr. Nabuuma Shamim
Subscribe
KETI is a medical app aimed at improving healthcare access in Africa by connecting users with medical professionals for consultations, advice, and treatment. Key features include appointment booking, telemedicine, health record management, and medication reminders, enhancing healthcare delivery and accessibility throughout the continent.
The healthcare app KETI offers Africans who don't know English the ability to interpret medical documents concerning their health in Swahili and other African languages to "know more about their health," Dr. Nabuuma Shamim, CEO of Chil Femtech center and the KETI app co-founder told Sputnik Africa.
Made by a Ugandan and aimed at helping the nations of the continent, the KETI app will help "to exactly understand what they are suffering from, know more about their health."
"So in this way, we are empowering people who do not know English," Shamim said.
To improve the situation in the area of healthcare on the African continent, it is important to reach rural places, as their "health facilities do not have the funds to hire doctors all the time, do not have laboratories, do not have pharmacies," she said, adding that the AI chatbot KETI can be a really effective solution.
"This thing started back in 2017. First of all, I grew up in Africa, specifically Uganda. So I often saw different parents struggle to understand the medical records," she said regarding the origin of the app.
The app started as a tool for "interpreting medical documents for cancer," the doctor explained, and AI has been being trained all these years.
"And then so recently that we're able to launch out that it can be able to interpret not only the cancer documents but also all other medical documents someone can have," Shamim said.
The KETI app has two versions: one for hospitals and health facilities, and another for anyone to use via web and WhatsApp. It helps interpret medical documents and answer health-related questions. Currently available in Swahili, they plan to add more languages, like Zulu, to reach more native speakers. The hospital version includes advanced video conferencing with a feature that summarizes virtual doctor-patient conversations, accessible later as an audio file or PDF, the doctor explained.
On the local market, the app offers medical document interpretation in Swahili, empowering non-English speakers in Africa to understand their health better. Summaries of doctor visits can also be interpreted in Swahili, helping patients explain their situation to caregivers. This approach is tailored to meet the needs of people in Africa, which is different from Western apps that are focused on English-speaking patients.
"We have a telemedicine company, and we partner with local health facilities to offer them services of e-consultation, e-referral, and e-laboratory services. So in this, with KETI, it can help them be able to get services in a language they can understand, not specifically here the interpretation alone," the doctor underlined.
Shamim is considering collaborations with various governments, like Uganda, to improve healthcare ecosystems. She believes that working with government health departments can help collect and analyze health data to monitor public health trends and identify outbreaks.
"So this can lead to more effective public health innovation," she underlined, adding that the team is "also looking at working together with the existing health care infrastructure of the different countries, not specifically Uganda alone, but this is something that they are looking at a global level, different African countries."
Thus, support from the KETI app will be provided "for health information dissemination so that people can know exactly how they should handle their health. And in languages that are more familiar to them," Shamim said.
Considering the safety of the app, the doctor assured that all information shared with KETI is encrypted, ensuring patient data is safe from unauthorized access. KETI complies with various data protection laws across Africa, ensuring the responsible handling of patient data according to each country's guidelines.
"And also the storage of data, we ensure that we store this data on secure servers so that the information is really kept sensitive. And also, with the team that we work with, we train our members on confidentiality and data protection policies and also sign agreements with them that the health care information of the patients should be kept really secure. And it's really sensitive," she highlighted.
Among the improvements that are planned to be implemented in the app, the doctor named adding more languages to reach a wider audience, ensuring that services are accessible to those who do not speak English. Additionally, they aim to develop features for interpreting medical images like X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans, which KETI currently cannot handle.
The CEO mentioned that patients appreciate that KETI simplifies complex medical information, making it easy to understand and personalized in their own languages. Hospitals also benefit, as KETI reduces workload by summarizing conversations, allowing healthcare staff to focus on seeing more patients and other tasks, thereby improving efficiency.
To reassure the safety and professionalism of the app, Shamim said it was designed not to replace doctors, medical professionals, or nurses."
"No, it has come to make work easy. For example, as I said in the health facilities, it helps these health professionals to be able to have summaries of what has been talked about so they don't take a lot of time writing the summaries and all that. So it's just to make their work easy while also helping interpret in different languages," she pointed out.
Despite the good intentions, creating and implementing this app faced several challenges, as it needed vast amounts of data for training. Initially, it only interpreted cancer documents but later expanded to include various documents, requiring even more data to ensure accurate outcomes for users. Moreover, each African country has its own regulations, making it complicated and expensive to comply with all of them. Long-term planning is difficult because moving to another country can require data to be stored locally, adding to the complexity, she explained.
Nevertheless, Shamim is very positive about KETI app and its future on the continent.
"In our long-term vision, we are providing accurate and comprehensive healthcare information to everyone, regardless of their language, their location, or their economic status. In short, we are looking at ensuring universal access to healthcare information for everyone," she shared.
Among other goals in the next five to ten years, the expert hopes for KETI to reach over one billion people globally. The team behind the app plans for it to become more advanced in interpreting medical documents, like CT scans and X-rays, and help run health facilities with minimal supervision.
This will automate many tasks and reduce healthcare disparities, making medical knowledge more accessible, especially in regions with limited resources. Additionally, KETI will support local languages and offer services via phone for those without internet access.
