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How it works, step by step

There are seven steps between somebody walking up to a DOGO stand and a donor in London finding out that person's name. None of them are automated away, and one of them is deliberately done by a human being.

1. The stand

Our team sets up in a community. It is not a hospital and it is not a clinic. It is a table, a team, and a book of six-digit numbers. Someone comes over, talks to us, registers, and receives a six-digit DOGO ID. That number belongs to them.

The stand matters more than it sounds. Many of the communities we work in have no reliable internet connection and an average household income of around two pounds a day. The stand is the point where somebody who would otherwise never enter the healthcare system enters it. Some of our stands run on satellite internet, which is why we can stand one up in a matter of days rather than months.

2. The clinic

They take that number to one of our partner clinics or hospitals. No money changes hands and nobody is asked to prove they are poor. They say the number. That is the whole transaction from their side.

3. The treatment

They are treated by qualified doctors and nurses. These are real, existing clinics with real medical staff. We do not employ the doctors and we do not run the buildings. What we change is who pays.

The clinic records what was done and what it cost in DOGO Keeper, an app we built specifically for partner facilities. Doctors cannot create cases in Keeper. They can only treat and document cases that were already approved at a DOGO stand. That constraint exists to stop the system being gamed from the clinic side.

4. The bill reaches London

The itemised bill arrives with our team. It lists what was actually provided: the consultation, the tests, the tablets, the injections, the dressings.

5. A human reads every record

This is the step that costs us time and that we refuse to remove. Before anything goes near a donor, a person on our team reads the record. They check the details are coherent. They rewrite the doctor's prescription into plain words, so that a donor sees "Tablets", "Injections", "Consultation", "Tests" rather than somebody's private clinical notes. They choose the cartoon avatar that will stand in for the patient's photograph.

Two things are being protected here at once: the donor, from paying a bill nobody checked, and the patient, from having their medical history handed to a stranger.

6. The queue

Once a record is checked, that person joins the queue to be matched. They wait their turn.

7. The match

A donor is paired with them, in order of who has been waiting longest. The donation settles the bill. Funds go directly to the partner facility after our team verifies them. The exchange rate is frozen at the moment of matching, so the figure a donor is shown is the figure that was actually true.

The donor then sees who they helped: a first name, an age, a town, something about that person's life and what they hope for, why they needed care, and an itemised breakdown of what the money paid for.

Why the order matters

Notice that the treatment happens before the donation is matched. The patient is never waiting on a donor to appear. They are treated when they are ill, and the bill is settled afterwards. That is deliberate. A model where a sick person waits for a stranger on the internet to fund them is not a healthcare model, it is a raffle.

Read next: what a treatment actually costs, how we verify bills, or what donors see and never see.

DOGO is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1198719. Registered office: 2 Television Centre, 101 Wood Lane, London W12 7FR. Contact info@dogoapp.org. Page reviewed 25 August 2026.