Nearest Health Facility - KE
mapping for health
Picture this, you are a tourist (local, international, doesn’t matter) and have gone to an area with your choice attraction in flora and fauna. Suddenly, the unimaginable happens and you need medical services and don’t know where to start. The idea of this app is to fill in that gap; To help you in knowing where to start by making informed choices.
Why was this app built?
Going on in the spirit of accessible healthcare, we believe in the adage that information is truly power. This being the case the app was developed as a decision support system to aide the end user to quickly get information on their services of interest.
Features and Tech
Ensure to enable location permissions of the app.
- Distance from User
The app provides summarized facility data starting with facilities closest to the user. Using k-Nearest-Neighbour algorithm, the facilities are filtered down to 50 facilities within a 50km radius which can be queried for availability of required service.
- Semantic Search
After the AI winter in the ’90s, starting midway from the turn of the century, there came the golden age of AI with the year 2023 bringing the crescendo on this bull run. Whatever could be consumed by AI would be consumed by AI! As Gen Z/alpha would put it, it was giving FOMO (or the FOMO is FOMOing, whichever fits your palate).
In 2023 AI became accessible with the billion dollar developments of Large Language Models (LLMs). Standing on the shoulders of giants, we were able to develop semantic search by integrating an LLM with our bespoke data. Using this feature a user can search using free-text English. These queries have a wider scope, as the user can search for facility of interest in areas outside 50km of their radius. This leads to robust facility discovery.
- User Ratings
Any healthy system should incorporate feedback from its users, which helps in identifying areas of challenge and/or improvement. This in-turn helps facilities better in improving using evidence based decision making.
You can explore more of the app from this link: https://nearest-facility.amref.org/.
