When I first arrived in Yangon in July 2017, I had a hangout with my old classmates in the china town. They were studying master degree in emergency medicine ,pediatrics and public health. So, we talked about random subjects before we reached to a point that we all agree.
They said they were facing over workload in the emergency department.
However, not all patients attending are not emergency .Some are visiting to hospitals for OPD treatment. Basically, there is no filter mechanism to redriect these patients to corresponding specialists. They said there are specialist opd clinics on some weekdays but patients don’t know about the details when and where they can visit. Not only the patients, even general practitioners , doctors from other hospitals who are referring the patients to tertiary centers don’t have the information about OPD dates in hospitals.
The point is there is no comprehensive information system to publish all kinds of hospitals’ OPD days. I asked that where can I find all this information quick and easily . They said No, even the ministry of health doesn’t have that data. The hospitals don’t need to share these opd days to ministry. So, there is no option except the fact that you have to contact each and every hospital in person .
My friends suggested that I could make an app to show this information. Of course, I do have to collect the data manually..But , If there was a platform where both health care practitioners and patients find the dates easily, there will be tremendous impact on the health system. All I have to do is initiate it . I am not sure they were being serious or not. Because, we all are drunk at that time. But, I considered about that thing seriously .
Finally, I decided to make it because I already have my new friend who is very good at programming . I have to explain which kind of app I want and he can make it happen . He is also an enthusiast about improving health system by means of technology.
At the night, when I got back to home, a half drunk I started to collect the opd days from different hospitals. I uploaded a post on Facebook, asking for help from my classmates from different hospitals. Some of them were very helpful by sending pictures and texts from messenger. I copied all the information from pictures into a google sheet which was designed by my developer friend.
Pictures of OPD schedule sent by my friends
After working 4 months on this project, we finally had a prototype of our app.
On December 1 2017, we were able to upload our first collaborated app on google play store. It has OPD information from more than 50 hospitals and keep increasing everyday . We squeezed our time and used minimal budget to produce this one. WE are very happy that we made it .
But, this is the first step. We aimed this one to be the reliable app for every practitioners and patients. So, we have a vision to improve this app with advanced features. Although, we could develop My OPD app with free services we had, we cannot rely on that free thing if we have a plan to be advanced.
Not only the human resource, but also the money,management and cooperation might be needed in the future.
We still have to wait and see how the public will respond.
After that , we could make more steps.
MY OPD, Download
December 8 2017
Dr. Nyein Chan Ko Ko
Myanmar
< if donation is the some kind of contribution not only about the money. We are contributing our knowledge, technology , money and time for the community . I hope people could see this and make it useful.>
Designing how do we show data on app.
