Innovation
From a Classroom Idea to a Working Health Referral App
Team of four students, Faculty of Computing
- 2
- Clinics piloting
- 3
- Prototype iterations
- 4
- Team members employed
The challenge
Where they started
Patients arriving at Mogadishu hospitals without referral records faced long delays while staff reconstructed their history by phone, and clinics had no reliable way to track whether a referral had been acted on.
Our support
What RIO Center did
The team joined the RIO Innovation Bootcamp, where they validated the problem with clinic staff, built a low-fidelity prototype, tested it with two clinics, and iterated three times on the feedback. RIO Center provided mentorship, lab access, and introductions to hospital administrators.
The outcome
What changed
The team completed a working prototype and presented it at RIO Demo Day. Two clinics agreed to a pilot, and the team has since registered as a company.
“We arrived with an idea we had argued about for a year. The bootcamp made us go and talk to the people who actually had the problem, and within a week we understood we had been solving the wrong half of it.”
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