KAMPALA — Health-technology firm Chil Group has launched a platform aimed at easing the shortage of specialist doctors in rural health facilities, allowing consultants based in urban hospitals to join ward rounds for rural inpatients by video.
The company said many of the facilities it works with lack specialists such as cardiologists, neurologists and intensivists, leaving patients admitted outside major towns without ready access to the expertise their conditions may require. Its E-Ward Round Platform, it said, is designed to close that gap by connecting rural clinical teams with urban-based specialists in real time.
According to Chil Group, 67% of its partner facilities have inpatient capacity, amounting to more than 260 wards. The firm said the platform would run alongside its free electronic medical records (EMR) software, enabling specialists to take part in multidisciplinary rounds without patients being transferred long distances. UG Standard was not able to independently verify the company’s coverage figures.
“Patients should not have to travel hundreds of kilometres to access specialised medical care when technology can bring that expertise directly to them,” said Dr Shamim Nabuuma Kaliisa, founder and chief executive of Chil Group.
She said the company’s business-to-business telemedicine services had focused mainly on outpatient care over the past six years, and described the platform as an effort to extend that model to inpatients. “The E-Ward Round Platform represents the next step in our mission to make quality healthcare more accessible across Africa,” she said.
Chil Group said the platform connects to bedside medical devices, giving remote specialists access to patients’ vital signs, diagnostic data and health records during virtual rounds. It said the system also carries an AI-powered triage tool that analyses patient data to help clinicians prioritise urgent cases, though the company did not release independent evaluation data on the tool’s performance.
On data protection, the firm said the platform uses what it described as a “zero-knowledge” architecture, assigning each inpatient bed a cryptographic token so that clinical data can be processed without exposing patient identities. It said personal information would be accessible only to authorised clinicians.
The company said the module was available immediately for deployment across its partner facilities with inpatient capacity.
Chil Group describes itself as a provider of business-to-business telemedicine and health infrastructure serving close to 400 health facilities. Kaliisa, a Ugandan entrepreneur, has previously been named to the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 list for her work in digital health.
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