Kaki has launched!
Yeo Yong Kiat | Kaki launches today on Apple and Google app stores!
"Yong Kiat, one year, possible?" - Ong Jing Fang
"Haha, no engineering manager would be crazy enough to commit his team to something that wasn't sized. But if you're asking for my personal opinion of their velocity, of course the team will deliver." - Yeo Yong Kiat
When Jing Fang asked me whether the team could complete the user discovery process and deliver a complete socio-healthcare application within a year, I made a classical "promise without commitment". Today, I'm proud to announce that both the GovTech and National Healthcare Group teams have successfully launched our Kaki pilot with a select group of community providers, caregivers and residents, all within a year! Have a go at finding us on the various app stores - for now, we're opening only to a small group of users.
User discovery, development, security clearance and going live on the app store all within a short span of a single year is no easy feat! Kudos to Shaina, Hoon Ling & Lay Hui for excellent product leadership, and the engineering team Eileen, Jun Hong, Yining, Chadin and Nicholas for many sleepless nights. Also grateful for NHG's strong support and excellent change management conversations, as well as the openness of our community providers (AWWA, Care Corner, PCN GPs and NHGP) to try something new in busy healthcare.
Kaki marks a transformation in how care providers, residents, and caregivers collaborate by moving from fragmented communication to a common platform. This is by no means an indictment on our public healthcare system - try coordinating between thousands of service providers and residents, and any system will struggle.
As part of our personal lives as caregivers, Jing Fang and I believed that enabling direct information sharing between parties in care and empowering personal management of care information were key to moving HealthierSG forward. This is why we mooted the development of Kaki, an application that allows for the decentralisation of socio-healthcare info that removes the needy for costly centralised IT systems across the socio-healthcare spectrum.
And the bonus(es)? We preserve the centrality of NEHR at the same time - because decentralisation and centralisation can both co-exist at the same time. We also included an intuitive chat interface for providers and caregivers to coordinate care securely, with in-built consent mechanisms, auto-categorisation of care records, and auto-management of the various sources of information from different caregivers and providers.
But don't just take it from us. We'll be piloting this as a proof-of-concept, to verify the benefits of bringing caregivers, residents and providers closer together. If it works, well, we'll be bringing this to communities near you in 2025!
Not satisfied with a high-level description? Curious to find out more about such a decentralised socio-healthcare docket? Stay tuned to this space for more updates!