AfriHealth — Rural Telemedicine Platform

AfriHealth is a telemedicine platform purpose-built for rural and peri-urban communities in East Africa, where the nearest clinic may be an hour away and the nearest specialist several hours further. The platform connects patients with doctors and nurses via video consultation, enables digital prescription and pharmacy delivery, and provides community health workers with digital tools to conduct assessments, track patient outcomes, and escalate cases requiring specialist attention. The platform addresses a critical gap in healthcare access. According to Kenya's Ministry of Health, there are fewer than two doctors per ten thousand people in rural counties. Telemedicine does not replace in-person care, but it dramatically extends the reach of the health system — allowing a patient in Turkana to consult a cardiologist in Nairobi without a fourteen-hour journey. The technical architecture centres on a progressive web app that works on low-end Android devices with intermittent 3G connectivity. The video consultation engine will be built on WebRTC with a TURN server fallback for NAT traversal in challenging network environments. We will implement adaptive bitrate video that degrades gracefully to audio-only when bandwidth is insufficient. The appointment booking and queue management system must work reliably offline, syncing when connectivity is restored. The patient health record is the most sensitive component — we are implementing FHIR-compliant data structures, end-to-end encryption for all health data at rest and in transit, and role-based access control that ensures a community health worker can only see the patients they are responsible for. We are integrating with Kenya's National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) for coverage verification and claims submission. The backend is Python with FastAPI and PostgreSQL, chosen for the rich ecosystem of healthcare and NLP libraries available in Python, particularly for medical entity extraction from clinical notes. The frontend is a Next.js PWA deployed as both a web app and a lightweight Android wrapper via Capacitor.