From the outset, My Doctor has faced typical process-related challenges for a new digital health service. Telemedicine is still a relatively new concept in the country, so both patients and doctors have needed time and support to adapt to remote consultations as a normal part of care. Some clinicians were initially cautious about changing their workflows and about making decisions without a physical examination. Technical and contextual challenges include variable internet connectivity in some rural areas and the need to ensure acceptable performance on low-end smartphones, as well as adapting to a still-evolving regulatory environment for telemedicine and digital health.

Continuous onboarding, clear clinical scenarios where teleconsultation is appropriate, and involving early adopter doctors as champions have been crucial to building trust. On the patient side, it has been important to explain what telemedicine can and cannot do, and why in some cases an in-person visit or tests are still necessary. A specific design and process challenge has been to keep all clinical communication inside the platform rather than drifting into informal channels such as messaging apps. While it is often tempting for both doctors and patients to switch to familiar tools like WhatsApp, the project made a deliberate decision to avoid this in order to preserve data security, proper documentation and quality control. This required simplifying and optimising the user experience in the My Doctor app so that consultations are as easy as chatting in a messenger, but remain structured, traceable and compliant with medical and data-protection requirements. At the same time, several factors have positively influenced implementation: growing smartphone penetration, increasing familiarity of the population with digital services, and the interest of insurers and employers in using telemedicine to improve access to care and reduce costs. Clinics are involved mainly as referral destinations rather than core financial or technical partners, which allows the platform to remain relatively independent and flexible. Based on this experience, key recommendations and emerging best practices include: (1) invest early in user-centred design so that both patients and doctors find the platform as simple as a messenger but more reliable and safe; (2) make a clear strategic decision to keep consultations within the platform, and align all training, product design and support processes around that; (3) build a diversified sustainability model that combines direct-to-consumer services with partnerships with insurers and employers; and (4) plan for interoperability with national digital health systems and regulations so that telemedicine can be scaled and integrated into routine care rather than remaining a parallel service.