Project Foundation and Boundaries

Your Why
You have seen firsthand as a pharmacist how slow antibiotic decision-making in Kenyan hospitals directly worsens both antimicrobial resistance and patient outcomes. This observation drives what you are doing: you want to help bring about faster, guideline-aligned antibiotic prescribing decisions for hospital clinicians in referral hospitals, beginning with adult inpatient wards. You recognise that your project can influence how quickly and accurately lab results are converted into prescribing recommendations, though you cannot control hospital staffing levels, lab turnaround times, or whether clinicians ultimately choose to follow a recommendation.
Your Project's Purpose
Help hospital clinicians in Kenyan referral hospitals move from slow, misaligned antibiotic prescribing decisions toward faster, guideline-aligned ones. You want adult inpatient ward clinicians to make better decisions that improve patient outcomes and slow antimicrobial resistance—a change you have seen firsthand as a pharmacist makes urgent. Your project can influence how quickly and accurately lab results become prescribing recommendations. What remains beyond your control is hospital staffing, lab turnaround times, and whether clinicians ultimately follow a recommendation once made. This is your working purpose, to be refined as evidence emerges.
What You Bring
Professional experience: You have built a working understanding of the antibiotic prescribing workflow as a pharmacist and direct knowledge that the current decision cycle from lab result to prescribing action takes significantly longer than necessary, with no existing software tool currently closing that gap for Kenyan hospital clinicians.
Programme and planning work: You have completed FAS Biocamp with a pitch deck, business plan, and technical PRD, and registered your company with a live website.
Core capability: You can develop a platform that converts antibiotic susceptibility test results into guideline-aligned prescribing recommendations, with the core automation approach settled although interface, deployment model, and potential additions remain open.
Current resources and relationships: You have a clinical advisor and a potential technical co-founder who has responded positively, along with your completed pitch deck, business plan, technical PRD, and registered company with live website.
Capability gaps: Your plan depends on securing the technical co-founder formally, raising the planned funding, and gaining access to a hospital willing to pilot the tool.
Ethical and safety framework: You are prepared to handle patient data confidentially in line with health data protection requirements and to position the tool as decision support only, ensuring clinicians remain accountable for prescribing decisions.
Where You Must Begin
ConstraintWhat it means for where I startYou have a completed pitch deck, business plan, technical PRD, a registered company with a live website, and a clinical advisor in place; your immediate starting point is to work with what you have while you move to formalize the potential technical co-founder relationship.You depend on securing a technical co-founder formally before you can advance development; you can begin mapping what skills and responsibilities you need to clarify in that conversation, but cannot commit to a development timeline until that is resolved.You depend on raising planned funding; you can use your existing materials to pursue funding conversations, but cannot commit to a pilot or scaled testing until funding is secured.You depend on securing access to a hospital willing to pilot the tool; you can begin identifying and approaching potential pilot partners now, but your testing phase cannot begin until you have a formal agreement in place.You must handle any patient data used in testing confidentially and in line with health data protection requirements; you can only proceed with testing involving real patient data once you have confirmed you can meet these requirements in your chosen testing environment.You must position the tool as decision support only, not a replacement for clinical judgment, so that clinicians remain accountable for prescribing decisions; this shapes how you design the tool, communicate its purpose, and set expectations with any pilot partner from the outset.How You Think the Change Happens
Chain of steps: You believe that automating the interpretation of lab results into prescribing recommendations will let clinicians act in minutes instead of waiting hours, which should reduce inappropriate or delayed antibiotic use and over time reduce the pressure driving antimicrobial resistance.
Least certain step: You flagged as least certain whether clinicians will actually trust and follow a software recommendation over their own judgment, especially without an established track record in Kenyan hospitals.
Dependencies: The pathway depends on hospital clinicians and pharmacists who would actually use the tool, hospital administrators who control adoption and procurement, and a technical co-founder to build and maintain the platform.
Decisions by affected people: You said clinicians should help decide how the recommendation is presented and integrated into their existing workflow, and hospital administrators should help decide what evidence or pilot results they need to see before adopting it.
What You'll Test First
First assumption: Whether clinicians would actually trust and act on a software-generated prescribing recommendation, rather than just treating it as an interesting but ignorable suggestion.
What you need to learn: Whether clinicians in a pilot setting genuinely change their prescribing behavior based on the tool's recommendations, and whether hospital administrators see enough evidence to consider adopting it beyond the pilot.
Decision rule: You have not stated a decision rule that would lead you to stop or pause.