Health-tech stood out at this year’s FNB App of the Year Awards as Vula Medical, an application that connects general medical staff with specialists that are on call in an area, took top honours in Johannesburg on Thursday evening.
In a post-event interview with TechCentral, Vula Medical founder and CEO Dr William Mapham said Vula was initially designed to help patients in rural settings who would often not be able to fulfil referral appointments where the specialist may be hours away.
“My passion is rural healthcare. We did our best in 2004 as junior doctors but there was a particular case where a gentleman unfortunately went blind because I could not get specialist advice.
“Later, when I was working at the Vulamehlo yemaSwati Eye Clinic in Swaziland, we discovered that one of the workers had a Blackberry they could use to send us pictures. That is when we realised that the technology had caught up with the problem and we could use it to do something,” said Mapham.
Instead of writing a referral to a hospital or clinic as a general entity, Vula allows nurses and GPs to identify specific specialists in their geographical area and connect them directly with patients. In some instances, the application is used as a remote diagnostics tool, with the non-specialist using guidance from the specialist to take further action to assist the patient. In instances where the patient must see the specialist in person, the application creates a link between the two, preventing instances of patients getting lost in the system or simply falling out of it.
Mapham said the Vula app is designed to be small in size, as keeping it light makes messaging faster. Pictures sent through the app are also saved in the cloud and not on a user’s phone, keeping its memory footprint low.
Expansion
Despite being designed for rural settings, Vula is making strong headway in urban, peri-urban and suburban settings, too. The platform has expanded to 2 800 facilities in South Africa, with medical practitioners in well-known facilities such as Durban’s Albert Luthuli and Cape Town’s Groote Schuur hospitals all the way to tiny facilities in places like Nababeep in the Northern Cape.
After 11 years of activity, the Vula platform boasts 42 000 registered healthcare workers in 76 different specialities, most of them in South Africa. The platform has serviced some 2.5 million patients over its 11-year lifespan and is expanding to eight other African countries, including Zambia.
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The ear, nose and throat (ENT) department at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town uses Vula Medical to manage referrals across the entire ward. Speaking to TechCentral in an interview on Friday, Dr Wasim Mahomed, an ENT registrar at the hospital, said Vula helps doctors make on-the-spot decisions about patients who reside on the periphery of the hospital’s catchment area.
“Our department uses it for semi-urgent referrals on the periphery. We can get details about the patient, including pictures, very quickly, and then decide if there is a need for the patient to come in, if they should be rushed to another facility, or if they come in electively (scheduled in advanced and not an emergency). The information is easy to access so decisions can be made in any setting, even when we are at home,” said Mohamed.
As an App of the Year winner, Vula joins the ranks of previous winners including EskomSePush, Naked Insurance and Checkers Sixty60. Last year’s winners, ed-tech platform Matric Live, were also in attendance at this year’s event.
Vula’s Mapham described technology as an enabler with the potential to solve many problems where resources are constrained and human lives are at stake.
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“Technology might not solve all our problems, but if we use it in the right way, we can really make a difference. If you think about what is in your pocket, it is a supercomputer with more computing power than took someone to the moon. We need to harness it as much as possible to make sure patients get the best possible healthcare,” said Mapham. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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