Technology contributing to a better primary health service in rural areas of developing countries

mDoc is a medical expert system for tablet computers. It supports healthcare workers to conduct a medical diagnosis at close to MD-level quality.

It uses a series of questions as any real doctor would use, and adjusts further questions based on previous answers. Using the patients' responses and the examination results from a healthcare worker, mDoc evaluates the symptoms and determines the potenial causes, sorted by probability. mDoc can differentiate among the most common 400 illnesses.

Our goal is to use mDoc to contribute to existing primary health care programs in rural areas of developing countries.
By supporting health workers with limited medical knowledge with a tablet computer running mDoc, they will be able to give diagnosis as well as treatment recommendations to patients in remote areas which are not sufficiently covered by today's primary health care services.

This is a small demo example of the mDoc system in Spanish language:

Did you know that...?

...while in developed countries the minimal coverage of 2.3 doctors per 1000 inhabitants is exceeded (US: 2.7, Germany: 3.5), in developing countries this index is very low (Peru: 0.9, Nepal: 0.2) - and this average includes the major cities, where most doctors are located.