Dharma: Empowering healthcare through actionable information

Dharma: Empowering healthcare through actionable information

Stefan Nagey, CEO & CTO, DharmaStefan Nagey, CEO & CTO, Dharma
Even in the most ideal environments, health professionals struggle to capture and interpret data to improve patient management, resource efficiency and ultimately health outcomes. This issue is exponentially more challenging in remote settings with limited or no access to the internet. As the first of its kind out-of-the-box solution, Dharma was built to empower frontline health workers, clinicians, and health system leaders by delivering information and insights about the health of individuals and communities, exactly where it is needed, in real-time. Dharma’s technology was developed by epidemiologists and statisticians working in crisis zones who were faced with the fact that people were dying as a direct result of the inefficiencies, delays, and errors inherent in paper forms and spreadsheets. Today, Dharma’s software is empowering health professionals around the world to spend their time responding to patient needs rather than cleaning spreadsheets, making pivot tables, hiring consultants, or worrying about customization and deployment of information management software.

Dharma is built with the user at the center of its design. Its user-focused platform bundles analytics, custom mobile app development, relational database development, system administration, data backup, security, and data management tools in a single, intuitive interface. Dharma’s users can, without any support, build and refine the tools necessary to provide optimum care in any situation. “It is a magic box that eliminates middlemen such as business analysts, developers, and consultants,” says Stefan Nagey, CEO and CTO of Dharma.

First deployed in 2015 by the world’s largest medical organization, Dharma continues to be used by health professionals to manage and analyze patient information, enabling needed medical assistance to at-risk populations and refugees around the globe.


Dharma powers baseline health surveys in refugee contexts to gain critical insights needed to direct resources effectively when lives are on the line. Furthermore, the information gathered can be viewed in multiple languages depending on the user’s interface.

Dharma is tech that works— even with little or no connectivity. One of Dharma’s latest features is its Mobile Mesh networking capabilities that enable clinicians to securely transfer patient data even when offline, connecting the first device to a second device through local data synchronization. “When either of the devices is connected to the Internet, the data is then backed up to the cloud,” explains Nagey. The feature makes it easy to track the patient journey through a health provision point; a patient form created during triage can be reviewed by the nurse practitioner who can add information about previously collected laboratory results at the same time. Meanwhile, the medical doctor on the other side of the clinic can see the information updating on her own device, and the pharmacist can start preparing the patients medication simultaneously, all offline.

Dharma creates a powerful, intuitive and complete ecosystem with the user at the center who can customize and deploy their own data warehouse, user interface, dashboards, and mobile apps with minimal training and zero consulting. The platform, deployed in the Google Cloud infrastructure and implements robust security measures— including end-to-end encryption—to ensure compliance with HIPAA and GDPR regulations.

Dharma represents the future of data, free of the constraints, delays, and costs associated with data management systems of the past. “We are enhancing the user experience in difficult environments while empowering the user,” concludes Nagey. Healthcare professionals of any background now have the ability to build and deploy the information systems they need, when and where they are needed, delivering value for money, improved impact, and lives saved.