Tatu Nurse

Uganda, just like other least developed African countries, faces a critical shortage of health workers required to achieve the UN Health‐related Sustainable Development Goals (WHO 2015a). Uganda has a nurse to patient ratio of 1 per 11,000 against the World Health Organization recommended ratio of 2.5 per 1,000.

On average, a nurse has 40 patients under their care every day. The nurse is required to take vitals of these patients, administer treatments periodically; 6 hourly, 8 hourly, 12-hourly, etc. The same nurse is required to perform other nursing tasks such as bed making, 2 hourly turning of very sick patients, bed baths among other tasks.  At the end of the day, nurses are burnt out. They do not complete all the tasks they are supposed to in time. As a result, a number of patients deteriorate or even die.

The patient to nurse ratio is not only affecting patients but also nurses who are at risk of emotional exhaustion, stress, increased risk of error, there by compromising patient safety, increased occupational injury, increase in nurse turn over, there by leading to greater costs for the employer and the health care system.

Tatu nurse is a mobile phone application that enables nurses to work smarter by providing them with the right information at the right time, hence improving the quality and efficiency of nursing care.

Tatu nurse fits in the daily routine of nurses enabling them to manage the many patients under their care efficiently. Tatu nurse is tailored to the specific context and needs of low-resource hospitals, has local technical support available and is economically sustainable. We maintain a patient-centered, practical and integrated approach focused on improving the quality of nursing care.

Tatu Nurse bears an electronic task-manager on a tablet that is generated every morning by patient intake information and adjusted by nursing staff. This is key in prioritizing patients and tasks, ensuring that those that need of emergency care are attended to first.

Tatu nurse supports robust capture of vital signs. At the moment, nurses have to manually take all vital signs and record them on paper. The Tatu Nurse application is integrated with triage devices; for example, the Pulse oximeter to automatically capture pulse and oxygen saturation. This saves nurses at least 3 hours daily.

In addition, Tatu Nurse bears an early warning system based on World Health Organisation protocols, that will flag patients as Green, Yellow or Red representing Normal, Priority or Emergency respectively. This information is displayed on a TV dashboard so that all clinicians can see the status of each patient sorted by the bed number. This facilitates communication between clinicians and makes handovers seamless.

Tatu nurse also supports fast identification of patients. Patients will be given a wrist band with a bar code. Scanning the bar code with a bar code scanner will pop up the patient’s information.

Tatu Nurse embeds in training resources and decision support tools for continuous education about the latest evidence-based protocols and procedures.

 Tatu Nurse then automatically sends alerts in the form of personalized messages and automated calls calls to nurses about the actions to be taken concerning a patient. These alerts are flagged continuously and escalated to other clinicians on duty until the issue is addressed.

Tatu Nurse mobile phone application uses open source technologies. We use Java Android for the mobile phone application, MySQL database and PhP Laravel for the dashboard.

You can access the TatuNurse app from Google Play store here

Target market I: We target nurses in developing countries. Uganda alone has about 70,167 nurses and midwives registered with the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council. Africa has more than 5 million nurses. There are many more nurses all over the world who will benefit from Tatu Nurse. Tatu is a swahili word that means three. Our mission is improve the productivity of nurses by at least 3 times. Tatu Nurse application saves nurses at least 2 hours daily, from the time usually spent in documentation and book keeping. 

Target market II: Hospitals: We target both government and private hospitals. The quality of nursing care in these hospitals will be greatly improved with Tatu Nurse. 

Target market III: Researchers and implementing partners. We also target researchers and implementing partners all over the world. Researchers will benefit from the data analytics generated from using the Tatu Nurse application. 

Target Market IV: Patients: The biggest beneficiaries of the Tatu Nurse application are patients whose care is greatly improved. Patients can access their treatment plans, medical records, etc. on the Tatu Nurse application.

Samuel Mugisha graduated from the University of Manchester in 2018 with a MSc. Advanced Computer Science. He also holds an MBA from the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He has 12 years of experience in building e-health applications for resource poor settings. 

Anitah Ashaba Aheebwa, our clinical lead is a practicing nurse in Uganda at the national referral hospital, Mulago hospital. She experiences first hand the challenges that nurses face.

Philip Nomwesigwa is a senior enrolled nurse working in the public sector in Northern Uganda, a very poor resource setting. Here, he interfaces first hand with the challenges that nurse face. He previously worked at Church of Uganda Kisiizi Hospital for 4 years, a missionary hospital in a resource-poor western Uganda. 

Irene Magara holds a MSc. in Innovation management. She is the Chief Operations Manager at Tatu Nurse. She has spent the last 12 years working as a design engineer and bring the design engineering perspective to this team. 

We are working with nurses at Mbarara Regional Referral Hospital and COU Kisiizi Hospital in Uganda to capture input from the nurses. We use an agile methodology of development where the solution is developed iteratively through sprints; nurses providing feedback to the development team at teach stage. 

We align with the principles of digital development. 

More than 600 nurses use the TatuNurse application to access learning courses and educational materials. 

Our in-hospital application is currently at a pilot stage. We have been testing the application at 2 hospitals in Uganda. We are working with researchers to get validation for the application for widespread adoption. 

We would like to get more partners who can help advance our solution. 

We would like specialist advisory support to build an organisation and deliver impact at scale in a resource-poor context like ours.  

We would like to be part of a network of like-minded founders. 

We would like to get more media publicity and exposure. 

We would also like to get more support on impact measuring and monitoring. 

The current solutions on the market are mainly developed in the West. 

They rely on internet which is not readily available in response poor settings. They are not customized for the local setting. Tatu Nurse is designed in Africa for Africa. Tatu nurse does not rely on internet or require expensive devices and technology to operate.

Our leadership team has gender consideration with 2 females on the leadership team of 4. 

 Business model canvas can be found at: https://canvanizer.com/canvas/rwuJ0SlZmlMLP

We will offer a Software as a Service business model where hospitals will pay monthly fees of UGX 300,000 to 6,000,000 (USD 85 to 1,714) per month depending on number of users at the hospital. We will also make money from technical support that we will offer hospitals and nurses to use Tatu nurse. 

Patients will pay an annual subscription fee of UGX 10,000 (2 USD) annually to access reminders, follow up information, medical records on Tatu nurse any time they need to.

We will offer big data analytics and reports to researchers, implementing partners, etc. This will be negotiable depending on the requirement.

Seed for Global Health contracted Tatu Nurse training platform to deliver training to 120 nurses and medical students in Uganda and paid for this platform.  

Carealife Community Foundation (CCF), a Nigerian based non-for-profit organization, hired Tatu Nurse to  deliver training on Electronic Medical Records systems to Nigerian nurses and paid for this service.