Locally Developed Medical App wins Global Big Impact Award
The Mobile Premier Awards is the largest Global cross-platform app showcase and competition in the mobile industry, providing a point of reference for the startup and app community during the Mobile World Congress, the biggest conference on Mobile Technology in the world. The 9th edition of the Mobile Premier Awards took place in Barcelona on March 2, 2015 and featured winning apps from AppCircus events and AppCircus challenges from 2014.
460 apps from all around the world compete in on-stage pitching competitions during AppCircus Challenges throughout 2014. The Mobile Triage App won the African AppCircus challenge, at the Mobile Web Africa 2014, and qualified for the finals in Barcelona this year, wherein 16 Finalist apps competed and are judged by a panel consisting of experts from Intel, Google and Amazon.
The Mobile Premier Awards grants 3 accolades for the Overall Top app, Audience award as well as the Big Impact Award. The Mobile Triage app won the Big Impact Award as the app with the most impact potential. As a result, the app was showcased live on the National Spanish Telvision Channel, BTV.
The Mobile Triage app was developed by The Open Medicine Project, a Cape Town based organization based at the Barn in Woodstock, founded by South African Doctors Yaseen Khan and Mohammed Dalwai. The company has produced a number of top medical apps which are used by over 30 000 (thirty thousand) healthcare providers around the world.
The Mobile Triage app is based on the South African Triage Scale (SATS), which is also used in many countries throughout the world, as it is a triage score designed for low-resouce settings. Triage is the process of sorting patients according to urgency in Emergency Settings, such as a hospital Emergency Room. It is vital that ill patients are indentified timeously and prioritized accordingly especially in busy emergency centres with a high influx and volume of patients. Devastating delays in treatment can occur if this is done incorrectly.
The Mobile Triage app allows healthcare workers to perform triage accurately, efficiently and safely by facilitating the identification of danger signs and symptoms, and colour codes patients according to priority as either Green, Yellow, Organge or Red. Additional features of the App now enable the calculation of Emergency drug dosages for children requiring resuscitation, as well as the shock-index, as an early indicator of shock in patients. Additonally, the app is enabled to generate important data on patient numbers, demographics, acuities which are vitally important for health facility managers. The app and system is also applicable to both the private and public sector and can be used by all levels of healthcare workers.

The Mobile Triage app was also piloted at Khayelitsha District Hospital in Cape town, in the Western Cape, during 2013 for 6 months where 1300 patients were triaged and an 88% increase in compliance to the SATS system was observed, indicating a significant upturn in accurate triage as well as a 50% decrease in triage time.
The Mobile Triage app and other initiatives by The Open Medicine Project seeks to support and facilitate the provision of timeous, quality and affordable healthcare services for citizens as a key National priority identified by the South African government. The Mobile Triage project is funded by the South African Medical Research Council (MRC), Strategic Health Innovation partnership (SHIP).
TOMPSA is currently situated at the Bandwith Barn who has provided mentorship and office space.