‘With Kangpe, we put a doctor in your pocket’

Kangpe is a basically a platform that allow people to ask any health question from real doctors and receive an answer in 10 mins. You can ask their questions, via SMS, Mobile app and web. Essentially we call it the doctor in your pocket. If you have a mobile phone, you have a doctor, thanks to Kangpe, that is basically what we are about.

We went online in July of last year, in a small test group but we fully launched in September 2015.

The reception has been fantastic! Right we typically answer about 200 questions everyday from different people, we have presence in about four countries across the continent – Nigeria, Angola, Kenya and Ghana.

About 25 percent of our questions come from outside Nigeria. We have being doing okay, the reception has been quite good. Obviously everybody has one health issue or the other that weighs on their minds, so Kangpe is an opportunity for them to get answers in an easy straightforward manner, and to get a response not just from anybody but from qualified doctors.

The way it works is that doctors on the platform download a doctors app, its called Kangpe for Doctors app, and in the process of signing up, they provide us their credentials, where they obtained them, they let us know where they work. So we take the information and carry out a thorough verification process. We even check up on classmates and work colleagues to confirm the genuineness of the claims.

We are not affiliated with the NMA and MDC Council, we wanted to get on a solid footing and do our work and later we can start having such kind of discussions. That being said these bodies are aware of what we are doing but in terms of formal relationships, not yet.

We were incubated by a government sponsored, technology incubator known as Idea Hub. So the IdeaHub is backed by the ministry of technology, there is a parastatal that is handing that along with job creation.

We sort of need to ask the question why don’t people follow up doctor’s recommendation?  More often than not, it is not that people don’t want to follow up, it is because the process of following up is difficult for them to understand the process. That is one thing Kangpe is here to change. We believe that everybody inherently wants to do the right thing, just that many times what prevents them from doing it is the difficulty in doing it.

That being said what we provide on the Kangpe platform is not a diagnosis, what we do is give you adequate information to make the right health decision. When you come to Kangpe and ask a question, the doctor is going to give you advice. Whatever we offer does not constitute consultation or diagnosis just a primary healthcare advice.

Theoretically any health issue can be asked on Kangpe, if you have anything that bothers your health you can come on Kangpe and ask and you will get a doctor who will give you advice on what the next best thing to do is.

Questions can be sent using the mobile app, through the internet via our website. Once a question is asked, we direct to someone with a speciality in that area and he will provide advice.

When a question is sent through, that day you can get your questions answered by a doctor regardless of what it is. Once you describe what the problem is we will able to link you with a doctor whose speciality it is.

Right now, the bulk of our users tend to be young people who are asking sexually related questions, some are anxious they are pregnant, I missed my period, I have rashes around my genitalia such kind of thing.

The beauty of Kangpe is that all questions are confidential. So the doctor on the other side doesn’t know who you are.

The confidentiality is the most motivation by some to use the service, people snap pictures of their body parts they think they have a problem with and send it in, nobody knows who you are, so once confidentiality is established people tend to be very open discussing their health issues. You even have elderly people talking about their hypertension etc.

So we are mostly a B2B as well as a B2C focused organisation. On the B2C side even though the large bulk of our questions are free, so people can come to the website and ask questions without paying but those free questions are limited.

They are limited to the number of text you can have and they also limited by how long it takes to receive an answer. So if you ask a free questions, it goes to the bottom of the pile, you will get your answers definitely, but it takes about 10 to 12 hours to receive an answer for the free question.

But if you pay for the question, then we take it a lot more seriously. If you pay for questions, you have significantly more length. You can talk a lot more about your symptoms. You can even have a conversation with the doctors and we allow you to attach pictures, text results to discuss with a doctor  and the most important part you get your questions answered very quickly.

Typically paid questions receive answers within ten minutes; sometimes we even get people who receive answers in about 3 minutes.

Now on the B2B side, we have a platform that we give access for companies. You have a lot two-man or three-man companies that may not be able to afford companywide health insurance for their staff and they find it difficult to look out for their staff and give them opportunity to receive some form of medical care, so we have a platform that we are building right now which makes it possible for staff of such companies to access doctors anytime.

We are also working with health insurance companies, HMO’s to make the access available for them to pass on to their customers.