Medical errors and misdiagnoses are said to occur often and lead to serious injury and even death, like in the case of doctors Kevin Muragijimana and David Ndayishimiye who sadly watched colleagues resign from their jobs out of fear of being sued due to errors, and noticed others who kept on making errors. In light of this, they co-founded Doctor AI, a mobile app designed to help healthcare providers in their clinical thought and decision-making, and help them prevent mortality and morbidity associated with medical errors. The two medical practitioners shared their entire academic journey, and have been best friends and roommates since their first year of high school. They came up with the idea to create an app for medical doctors in 2019, and registered it in 2021. “As doctors, our profession is more than just a job, it’s a vocation as my professors used to say, it is so demanding that a very small glitch in reasoning can lead to misdiagnosing a condition. Nowadays a big number of doctors are getting sued and jailed for various mistakes, and society is losing its people due to that. Many doctors are now leaving their careers for fear of getting sued. My co-founder and I at the time of establishing the idea were both medical students but with the same pain,” says Muragijimana. Doctor AI was a mutual prospect as they shared thoughts and ideas their whole lives. “We thought of a solution to address both problems and came up with it. The idea came mainly from the pain we had after seeing how many lives are lost due to medical mistakes and how many we could save if we had artificial intelligence as our second brain,” he explains. According to Muragijimana, the application is free to use, user-friendly, and available in English and soon in French and Kinyarwanda. “It requires the least minimal connectivity and is mobile based. As of now, we are making it reach to as many healthcare providers as possible so that those who are not familiar with or unable to use smartphones can be followed by their healthcare provider. It is designed in a way that healthcare providers can register and follow their clients,” he explains. So far the mobile application has been downloaded at least a hundred times as the most time was put into the piloting phase. Doctor AI helps doctors to detect diseases that were otherwise hard to diagnose with an accuracy of 95 per cent. “We are assisting doctors in their decision-making and diagnosis to prevent mortality and morbidity caused by medical errors. It enables an easy accessibility of healthcare services and healthcare providers, promotes preventive care, pushes for standardisation and innovation-based medical practices, and ensures good quality of life and follow-up to those living with chronic diseases,” Dr Muragijimana says. The colleagues met many challenges in the regulation and adoption phase while starting out and still face the same challenges to this day. “Regulatory boards don’t understand artificial intelligence and so it is even hard to give you a go ahead. Artificial intelligence is a new concept not only in Rwanda but worldwide. People are not yet familiar with its benefits but like Ray A. Davis said ‘a challenge only becomes an obstacle when you bow to it’,” he says. Their wish is that they reach a bigger number of healthcare providers, and with that, they hope to improve the standard of healthcare services, improve clinical outcomes and serve as a helping tool to healthcare providers and the medical profession in general.
