ONLINE PLATFORM FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS IN KENYA, AFRICA

Merck Unite - Case Study

Web and mobile Medtech app built with Ruby on Rails.

Jan Solecki ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE

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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. Alexander Hoffman Head of Digitization Africa, Merck

Scope and Highlights

EDUCATIONAL HUB
Web & Mobile development
RoR & Angular

Responsive design
team members
Postgresql

The Challenge

Merck Unite wanted to become the number one destination for any diabetes-related questions, advice, articles, events, research papers, and expert-led discussions in the field of diabetes.

Apart from creating a functional, user-friendly platform for Kenyan doctors diagnosing and treating diabetes, Merck was also planning to extend the scope of the platform to build an online healthcare hub.

Key challenges in this project include:

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

We felt the need to delve deep into Kenyan culture so that we could properly understand the people that we were to engage with the app. Having conducted research on the Kenyan internet use habits, we found our that only 4% of internet users use fixed broadband, hence the need for the app’s responsiveness and fast data transfer.

Bearing this in mind, we decided to go the full-SPA way and have Rails riding on the backend and only serving the API, which is consumed by Angular on the front. Core activities at this stage included:

Investigating Kenyan healthcare providers community for better understanding of their needs
Gathering a lot of cultural metadata
Data processing with postgresql to the limit

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. Paweł Hawrylak Senior Product Designer

The Outcome

Merck Unite became the number one online forum for asking medical questions, and for getting support from medical colleagues in Kenya and beyond. It now offers opportunities for medical professionals to attend accredited e-learning courses as well as webinars where diabetes experts speak about various important topics and organize Q&A sessions.

Merck Unite also gives access to content about diabetes, such as old and new 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 and our understanding of Kenyan culture to seed and transform our approach to the task.
Leveraging postgresql capabilities to make the app fast and responsive

My job is to gather your requirements, answer all your questions, and push your idea into development as fast as possible.

Jan Solecki