A local medical referral app, inspired more than two decades ago by the challenges of rural health workers and doctors in connecting patients with on-call medical and surgical specialists, has won a clutch of awards for its founder, including FNB Overall App of the Year and Best Health Solution 2025, reports News24.
An ophthalmologist who previously served as the vice-chair of the Rural Doctors Association of Southern Africa (RuDASA), the app’s creator, Dr William Mapham, said Vula Mobile was born from his experiences as a junior doctor in sourcing specialist advice.
Now – and since 2014, through the platform – healthcare workers can submit referrals and give patients greater access to specialists wherever they are.
As a junior doctor volunteering in rural South Africa, Mapham had realised, he said, that front-line health workers had no access to specialist advice that could help them diagnose and treat patients more effectively. Many people who ended up at the hospital could have been managed at the local health centre if only the health workers could have been connected to a specialist.
So, in 2014 he came up with Vula Mobile, to connect local health workers to on-call specialists.
Driven by a passion for improving healthcare, Mapham went on to become an ophthalmologist and the founder and CEO of Vula Medical. Although the app was initially designed for ophthalmology referrals, it has since expanded to include other specialities, like cardiology and orthopaedics, helping healthcare workers connect patients with specialists more quickly and efficiently.
Last year, Vula Medical was named FNB App of the Year, and Mapham was also honoured with the Discovery Health Leadership Award.
Germination
The inspiration for his app was a 2004 consultation with a patient who had a serious eye condition, he said.
Because he could not determine the condition, he wrote the patient a referral letter to Mthatha Hospital, the nearest specialist facility, about two to three hours away. Seven years later, while volunteering as a specialist, Mapham saw the same patient again. The patient had kept the original referral letter and returned to say that he could now see a specialist, but had never made it to Mthatha.
By then, the patient had gone blind in that eye. Mapham said he realised he had actually had the medication the patient needed during their first consultation. It was a deeply personal moment that made him understand how access to specialist knowledge could have changed the patient’s life.
As Mapham began specialising, he realised the problem was not limited to rural areas. The real issue, he came to understand, was the shortage of specialists.
The app is named after Vula Amehlo Eye Clinic in Swaziland, where Mapham had once worked. Vula means “open”, and Amehlo means “eyes”. It was at this eye clinic in 2010 that he first had the idea, and it took him three years of pitching before he got funding.
In feedback on the website, Dr Naadhirah Adams, from the Western Cape, said: “Before Vula, it would take me between 30 minutes to an hour to refer patients. Now, it takes me five minutes to send my referral directly to the person on call, which I can do in between seeing patients.”
Dr Helga Nauhaus from the Eastern Cape said: “Communication has improved vastly because we no longer have to rely on a switchboard that doesn’t know who’s on call.”
Funding
However, even though the platform has been growing, developing it has come with its challenges.
“Fundraising for Vula has been a constant challenge,” said Mapham. “I stopped practising as an ophthalmologist in 2017 to focus on finding funding for Vula full-time.”
He said that although technology might not solve all the problems, it could still be used in the right way.
“There are aspects of South African healthcare (such as) corruption in both the public and private sectors that need solving, but are beyond our reach. The best we can do is to make life easier for health workers at the frontline. There is still so much work to do and so many technical improvements we can make.”
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