Supporting Doctors in Africa

With a medtech platform for healthcare practitioners who want to know how to help their patients with diabetes.

The company and product

Merck Unite wanted to create a community for doctors in Africa who deal with diabetes on a daily basis but lack a place to exchange information on the disease, expand knowledge, and run expert-led discussions.

They decided to build a platform where medical professionals could meet online, share their expertise, and support each other.

Client’s feedback

Alexander Hoffman

HEAD OF DIGITIZATION AFRICA, MERCK

Technical expertise and understanding the context

I was impressed by Monterail’s services. Not only did they bring their technical expertise to the table, but they showed their sensitivity to the particular cultural context of this project by asking a lot of meaningful questions early on. Once they had fully and objectively analyzed the problems, they set about producing an original and extremely adequate application solution for the needs of healthcare providers in Kenya.

The Challenge

Getting together.

Besides creating a functional, user-friendly platform for doctors based in Kenya that diagnose and treat diabetes, Merck also wanted to extend the scope of the platform and build an online healthcare hub.

Key challenges of the project included:

Combining all of the focus areas in one comprehensive platform.
Supporting high monthly traffic.
Enabling the educational purpose in a user-friendly way.

The Process

Optimizing the tool based on users' internet access.

The process involved digging deep into Kenyan culture and internet use habits. The conducted research indicated that only 4% of internet users use fixed broadband, hence we focused on the app’s responsiveness and fast data transfer.

Bearing this in mind, the Merck Unite app went the full-SPA way and has Rails riding on the backend and only serving the API, which is consumed by Angular on the front.

Our core efforts at this stage included:

Investigating Kenyan healthcare the providers' community for a better understanding of their needs.
Analyzing a lot of cultural metadata.
Data processing with PostgreSQL to the limit.

Team’s voice

Paweł Hawrylak

Principal Product Designer

You have to understand the users

As designers, we allowed the Merck vision of community and our understanding of Kenyan culture to seed and transform our approach to the task. The excellent results of this approach are clearly to be seen in the fine product that we have been able to produce, both for Merck and also for the people of Kenya.

The Outcome

Merck Unite realizes its mission to empower scientific communities by creating a go-to place for medical professionals dealing with diabetes in Kenya and beyond.

The user-friendly web and mobile apps allow for comfortable knowledge-sharing and getting support really quickly.

The platform also offers opportunities for doctors to attend accredited e-learning courses and webinars where diabetes experts speak about various important topics and organize Q&A sessions.

Besides a vibrant community, Merck Unite also provides access to content about diabetes—treatment methods, scientific backgrounds, and research papers improving participants’ professional development.

The success of this project hinged on the following factors:

Allowing the Merck vision of community to seed and transform our approach to the task.
Incorporating insights on the Kenyan medical sector and internet usage habits into the application's way of functioning.
Creating an interface allowing for quick and easy navigation.
Leveraging PostgreSQL capabilities to make the app fast and responsive.