Nigeria’s startup NIXIT whose flagship product is HealthMobile has broken ground in the healthcare sector whose bane has been traced to be poor information management leading to misdiagnoses and wrong self medication in a bid to help people make better-informed medication and lifestyle choices.
Founded by Johnson Okoire and Joshua Ihejiamaizu currently final year students of Electrical Electronics Engineering at the Federal University of Technology, the two have collaborated with an advisory team made up of resident doctors from the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital.
The android application currently serving about 3000 users from different countries including Nigeria, the UK, US and India serves as a pocket doctor, with tons of data on diseases, symptoms, drugs, supplements, hospital locations, and food and diet recipes.
“It is like a Wikipedia for healthcare,” Johnson told TechMoran. “You search your interests and we display relevant data curated from trusted sources on the web. A search on the nutrient content of ‘Goat Head’ or ‘Plantain’ in the food and diet section will bring out results for all different possible preparations of the food. Same goes for the disease and drugs section. The hospital locator works either by search or by using your current location.”
HealthMobile is built around using it as a buiding block to create custom applications for individuals, hospitals, organizations, and health institutions and is also aiming to leverage on HealthKit SDKs recently released by Apple and Google to make more meaningful user health apps.
The startup has however faced challenges establishing the unique expertise.
“In Nigeria and even globally, people have delegated their healthcare to doctors and practitioners. Connecting users and building services that really gets them interested in health has been the biggest challenge. There’s also the problem of data: where to get it and how to collect it. Without meaningful data, healthcare IT services are meaningless.” Mr Ihejiamaizu told TechMoran
Currently housed by iDea Incubation Centre the Tinapa Knowledge City, Calabar, the firm plans on building the app into a web service that would allow easy data collection by on-field medical workers; which would allow it use that data to build smaller medical applications to meet everyday needs.
