SMS Doctors is a non-profit that aims at providing easily‑accessible and cost‑effective sexual healthcare information through SMS.
The project targets specifically adolescents with sexual health questions, accessed through selected high schools in and around Harare, Zimbabwe. Targeted adolescents will receive a generic text message with free sexual health information and will then have the facility to reply and ask questions related to that particular topic.
Supervised by doctors, medical students from both Zimbabwe and the Netherlands will discuss the responses to these questions, creating an international peer‑reviewed network. Responses to each question will be sent back through SMS.
Our role was to design and implement the application. The system is written in Ruby on Rails and SMS communication is facilitated by MessageBird.
In 2016 the Dutch magazine of medicine Arts and Auto wrote an article about SMS doctors.