Patients Provide Interaction Means for Fellow Patients and Doctors

The academic environment should be a field for interesting innovations, digital is no exception. Patients may be one of many stories about startups or applications that originated in academia. Mobile application withplatformAndroid This concept is similar to Patientia's social media, trying to provide a digital space for patients to communicate with doctors and fellow patients.

Patientia was developed by four students from Gajah Mada University (UGM). They are Fadli Wilihandarwo, Dimas Ragil Mumpuni, Haydar Ali Ismail, and Nur Hilda. patient is also a product of the Innovative Academy incubator, a startup incubator owned by UGM.

So far, Patientia has also received a number of awards, such as from the Start Surabaya Bootcamp, Indonesia Developer Summit, Indonesian Medical Information Forum, and Google HackFair 2015 which gave them the opportunity to present this application to Google's VP of Engineering when he visited Jakarta.

Patient's CEO Fadli Wilihandarwo said:

“Our Patient was founded because we saw our personal condition and experience when accompanying cancer patients through their examinations. Due to the waiting time which is much longer than the time for examining the patient itself, interaction between patients while waiting always occurs. We saw that they shared information about things that they didn't even get when they talked face-to-face with doctors and health workers. The experiences of patients who have recovered are sometimes shared. Not only that, the families who accompany patients also have knowledge that can be shared because of their experiences.”

Funding still bootstrapped

As an application or service developed by patients, Patientia is currently running with personal funding or funding bootstrapped. Likewise with the problem server, Fadli admitted that his party used a voucher of $100 obtained through the GitHub for Education program. Likewise for marketing, Patients also still have not spent funds to introduce their services.

Apart from using social media mainstream Like Facebook and Twitter, Patientia also cooperates with the patient community by offering a platform that can complement the communication and interaction needs of the patient community.

Become a means of interaction among patients and also patients with doctors

Just like with most social media, Patientia today (beta version 0.5.1) also provides standard social media features such as timelines for patients and doctors, comments, posts, and button support to show other users care and support for other users.

Patientia so far has several volunteer doctors who help, share, and answer questions from patients regarding their health complaints. Fadli also said that they are currently trying to collaborate with the health examination lab to provide benefits in the form of convenience for Patientia users in carrying out their health checks.

“Patientia's current focus is to continue to validate some of the assumptions we have formulated. In addition to viewing application usage statistics, analyzing post and how to from user as well as user activity in the application, we also provide herefeedback inside the app to hear feedback from user directly related to this application. This is very important for us, because in the future, we want the development of this application to depart from the real problems and needs of users. Hopefully, the social impact caused by this application can be very large, useful for improving the health of the Indonesian people more broadly, "said Fadli.

When asked about short-term targets, Fadli explained that in the short term, Patientia has set a target to be the application of choice for patients as a means of sharing and meeting other patients who have the same disease. Meanwhile, in the long term, Patientia hopes to become an upstream platform where all patients gather and can be integrated with other startups in Indonesia that can provide benefits for patients.