Situation
Cambodia has identified roughly 3,000 unlicensed medical practitioners. The cost of that is not abstract: in 2014, more than 170 villagers in Battambang province tested positive for HIV after an unlicensed doctor reused the same needles across patients, according to the WHO. He was later sentenced to 25 years.
The same gap shows up in smaller ways every day. Prescriptions get misused when nobody can check what was actually prescribed, and medication errors harm at least 1.5 million people a year in the US alone. Paper records sit at the root of it: they are easy to forge, hard to carry, and impossible to verify.
Task
I led a team of 7 students from five Cambodian universities into the 2023 Huawei Seeds for the Future Tech4Good competition, against 17 teams from South Korea, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
We set out to build the missing piece rather than another hospital records system: a centralized place where a medical record can be verified and retrieved by the patient who owns it. Existing electronic health records treat the patient as a secondary user, so we made patient-centric the whole point.
Action
We designed YourMedi, a mobile app that stores and manages medical records digitally with the patient holding consent.
Two points of view share one record:
- Patients see prescriptions, vaccinations, and blood test results in one place, with reminders for the next dose or the next test, and clear medicine composition so a refill elsewhere is safe.
- Healthcare professionals (doctors, pharmacists, phlebotomists) add records to a patient by scanning a QR code, and can view records from other institutions, which protects both sides from a false accusation.
Every record shared with a professional happens under the patient's consent, with verification pushed to their phone. We followed GDPR consent rules and Cambodian government regulation, and specified Huawei Cloud for secure storage.
As team leader I ran the team across those five universities and owned UX/UI design and innovation management: the two-sided flows, the QR-based record handoff, and the pitch itself. Alongside the product we built the business case, a subscription and advertising revenue model with funding paths through the Ministry of Health, JICA, and Marie Stopes, and a four-quarter roadmap from prototype to an iOS and Android launch.
Result
We placed 2nd in the Asia-Pacific region out of 18 teams.
The deeper result was learning to argue a product from a public health problem rather than from a feature list. Every design decision had to answer to a villager in Battambang who had no way to check whether the person treating them was licensed.