About us
Vula is a medical referral app and online platform that makes it easy for primary healthcare workers to get advice from and refer patients to specialists.
Vula connects clinicians to each other and their patients, with a seamless, integrated, secure platform, in order to deliver high quality, cost effective, accessible healthcare.
Available for Android and iOS. Designed to work in rural areas, it consumes less 20x less data than WhatsApp.
The Vula platform is a unique health technology solution, which was designed by healthcare practitioners for healthcare practitioners. It has grown organically in South Africa by meeting the critical needs of a high-demand system. It connects a broad range of HCPs, including pharmacists, GPs and community health workers, to localised specialist services within geographical areas, thereby delivering locally relevant specialist guided health care at primary facilities. It helps build primary HCPs' capacity through digital-based learning, which occurs during their daily work because they learn each time they contact a specialist. It helps develop relationships and build trust in a healthcare ecosystem by improving care for patients at primary facilities. Also, it helps deliver relevant information to patients and provides a system for data analysis and reporting.
Today, we have helped hundreds of thousands patients receive specialist guided healthcare in a secure and efficient environment. Additionally, previously unrecordable communication data is aggregated, valuable and made available to healthcare workers to optimise their practices and identify opportunities.
Our journey
Vula Mobile began in 2014 to connect healthcare professionals so they could send and receive the right information about a patient’s condition and chat securely.
The company was founded by Dr William Mapham (previous vice-chair of RuDASA and ophthalmology registrar at Tygerberg Hospital) following his experiences as a rural doctor and as a specialist. The App was initially designed at and then named after the Vula Emehlo Eye Clinic in Swaziland where Dr Mapham volunteered for 10 months and saw the potential for a mobile system to improve the referral system there.
With 11.4 specialists per 100 000 population in SA, specialists are under huge time pressure. (USA 54.7 per 100 000). Specialist’s landlines keep ringing and don’t always get answered, because the specialists are busy working. Patients in rural areas face long distances and expensive transport which stops patients from getting the right care. The result is that patients, doctors and specialists spend a lot of time and money on trying to communicate.
From these realisations, Vula Mobile was born.