Digital India by promoting Digital Health

My objective to do this post is to seek your opinion whether you would like to use Medzap or not. If your answer is yes, I seek your feedback on what more you would like to see in the product so as to use it every day. If your answer is no, I seek your feedback on how to make this product useful.

Let me start the post with the story on how we started MedZap

In August last year I was in the last month of my notice period from my employer, that is when I along with my co-founder started to deliberate on new ideas. We didn’t have any idea to work on but our vision was clear that we want to build something which will solve a real life problem.

Thinking of real life problems, I started to write down my routine mundane activities from last few months with the objective to find a real problem which I faced. Buying medicines was one of my regular activities (My wife was not really keeping well after we became parents). But was there a problem which I faced while doing this activity?

Yes there was. 2 out of 3 times I forgot to carry the prescription and thus had to go home to get the prescription. Also I used to forget the prescription at the chemists shop while collecting my medicines. Thus we decided to build Medzap to solve this problem.

We set out to discover what can be other use cases where people would like their health records to be available on their mobile. We discussed with people from India as well as other countries. Some friends from countries like France, Spain who travels frequently said they need a portable way to carry their doctor prescriptions so that they can refer them while travelling and don’t get into the hassle of managing paper records. Thus we were convinced about the idea of Medzap where the problem we are solving is “mobility and longevity of paper based medical records.”

Medzap is a simple application where user takes a picture of his/her medical records, adds doctor’s name & relevant keywords and saves the records. The record is then saved on the cloud and can be accessed anywhere anytime even if the user changes their mobile phone.

 

How it works:

Through Medzap we want to take forward the mission of “Digital India” by promoting “Digital Health“.

The data collected will help the doctors take informed decision based on the medical history of the patients. This data will also be used find the effectiveness of medicines. We have introduced doctor rating system also which will enable to get credible data on the doctors in your neighborhood.

We also ask the user to create his/her medical profile which include details like allergies, surgeries, life style, eating habits, job type, etc. This helps us analyze the common medical problems related to certain life styles, job types, etc.

In India, we take second opinions on our medical conditions. We have made this easier by integrating the app with the common messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook messenger and also the social networking & emailing websites.

The app is free for users and we plan to keep it this way. From the economic perspective, the app also has an expense tracker build into it, which helps the patients to track the money spent on each doctor/pharmacy/lab visit.

I always give this example of the most common use case in India: the use of antibiotics for any medical condition. If you are changing doctor and the new doctor gives you the same antibiotics as the earlier doctor then you are not going to improve. So carrying the earlier medical records is very important when you are changing doctors. And we make this easier by providing the medical records on your phone.

In terms of competition there are similar apps but even Google drive and Dropbox are also our competitors. However Medzap has been built around a much focused use case of storing files on cloud. The app also interacts with the user to check about the user’s well being and rate their experience at the respective hospital.

This is a guest post by Amit Kumar. You can download our Android app here - Download Medzap. We welcome your feedback; please share it with us at setup@medzap.co