Oystar

Close the loop.

A clinician sends the case. The specialist sends the answer back. The patients who never arrive get flagged, not lost.

Early access · real accounts, seeded data, no real patient records

How a referral moves through OystarA referral moves through six stages: sent, accepted, scheduled, attended, answered, closed. The loop closes only when the specialist’s answer reaches the clinician who asked. A second referral stops at “attended” because the patient never arrived, and is flagged instead of lost.SentAcceptedScheduledAttendedAnsweredClosedNever arrived. Flagged.The answercomes back

The loop

A nurse asks a question. A specialist answers it.

A nurse at a district hospital sees a pregnant woman with high blood pressure. She sends the case to an obstetrician in the capital. The obstetrician reads it, decides what to do, and sends the answer back. That is the loop.

Oystar follows all six steps. If one of them does not happen, you can see it.

  1. 01

    Sent

    Referring clinician

    The nurse sends the whole case, not a short note. She can paste it or photograph the paper form.

    REF-0241Urgent

    G1 P0, 32/40. BP 150/98, protein +2. No visual disturbance.

  2. 02

    Accepted

    Specialist

    A named specialist takes the case. If nobody takes it, the nurse is told.

    GN

    Dr Grace Nyiraneza

    Referral hospital · 4 slots open

  3. 03

    Scheduled

    Both facilities

    They agree a date. Or the specialist reads the case at once, and nobody travels.

    Tue 11 Aug · 09:30Confirmed
  4. 04

    Attended

    Receiving facility

    Did the patient come? If she did not, the nurse finds out. Today, nobody finds out.

    Did not attend. Transport is the barrier.

  5. 05

    Answered

    Specialist

    The specialist writes back what is wrong and what to do next.

    Gestational hypertension. Start methyldopa 250mg tds. Weekly BP locally.

  6. 06

    Closed

    Referring clinician

    The nurse confirms she has the answer. Only then is the case finished.

    Loop closed in 9 days

The gap

Sending is easy. Getting an answer back is not.

Out of every hundred referrals, this is roughly how many come back with an answer.

27 come back with an answer

73 do not

An example, not a measured national figure. Nobody counts this today. Oystar counts its own, and shows it whatever it says.

The patient

The patient needs nothing.

Most health apps ask the patient to do something. Install this. Confirm that. Tap here to keep your appointment. The patients most likely to be lost are the ones least able to do any of that.

Oystar asks the patient for nothing. The two clinicians do the work.

No app to download

Nothing to install. Nothing that breaks when the phone is replaced.

No account to create

No password. No portal asking for a number nobody kept.

No message to answer

A patient who never replies is tracked just as well as one who does.

If a clinic wants to call a patient who missed an urgent appointment, Oystar shows them who to call and why. It does not make the call.

Capacity

A referral is no use if nobody can take it.

Across much of Africa there is roughly one doctor for every several thousand people. Specialists are far fewer, and nearly all of them are in one or two cities. So the real question is not how referrals move. It is how far a small number of specialists can go.

Complete cases

A specialist who gets the full picture spends the visit deciding, not asking again.

Remote review

One cardiologist can answer cases from several district hospitals in a morning.

Nothing lost in transit

A booked slot the patient never uses is a wasted one. Now you can see it.

What teams see

You can see which districts get answers back.

Nobody fills in a form to produce this. It is counted from what actually happened.

Referrals answered, by district

Counted automatically. No hospital reports on itself. Shown here for Rwanda, our first market.

Answered0100%
Not yet on the network

Example figures, to show what the screen measures. The live product counts real referrals.

District boundaries: geoBoundaries, CC BY 4.0.

Security

Patient data stays with the hospital.

The hospital holds the record

Not the app, and not us.

Every look is logged

With a name and a time. The log cannot be edited.

Access ends with the case

A specialist sees it because it was sent to them.

Read the privacy notice for how records are held, shared and logged.

Walk a referral end to end.

Create an account, send a case, and watch the answer come back. Paste your notes or photograph the paper form. Oystar does the typing.