(413) 344-BEDS or (413) 344-2337
Judges call now, please try it.
Click here to open auto-updating website
Instructions
Wait 8 seconds for the twilio ad to finish. Press 2 to list beds, press 1 to enter your own bed.
If you press 1:
After the prompt, Pin 123 allows updating UCSF beds, 456 and 789 are different hospitals.After the prompt, type in the new number of beds for the hospital. It will thank you and list the hospitals with the updated count.
If you press 2:
It will list the beds.
Inspiration
Right now there is no centralized database of free psychiatric beds in hospitals, resulting in doctors and nurses calling around frantically to various hospitals. When I was hospitalized, I remember waiting for a long time as we were not sure if I would have a bed.
Recent article of inspiration: https://thinkprogress.org/state-of-emergency-24-states-lack-basic-tools-to-identify-open-beds-for-psychiatric-patients-8326a0dc6c4a/
What it does
It provides a phone number that a doctor or nurse can use to call once and announce bed availability to anyone who wants it, saving nurses and doctors interruptions, faster response times (some doctors take 1+ hours to do this task) to patients when they are most vulnerable, keeping symptoms from getting worse, and not kicking them to the street or put into jail when they need help the most.
Patients can go directly to a hospital with potentially available beds, saving transfer times and ambulances which cost $164 per mile and are charged to our most neediest.
How we built it
We wanted to meet nurses and doctors where they're most familiar. At the phone. They already have to give this non-private information multiple times which doctors call around. The voice system has two options, 1 to input new data and 2 to hear what is available.
We used Twilio to build out the phone information, and loopback.js to quickly generate a datastore with heroku. We used express.js to handle call routing as different options were presented.
Challenges we ran into
There were a few times when api calls weren't clear, and one time we messed up our git commit history.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have a fully functioning demo, where any hospital can change their bed count instantly.
What we learned
I learned twilio more in depth, he learned Git and GitHub's collaboration features better.
What's next for BedHeads
Once we start making money, we can schedule calls to go to hospitals once a day so that they can enter their bed count, freeing up nurses and doctors to focus on other things.
We can also start doing predictive analysis addressing the shortage of beds to more intelligently allocate them.
We can start diversifying the types of beds we keep track of. We can keep track of "Medicine Beds" which are beds that can accomodate with iv tubes and other hazards as well as mental illness and "youth beds" for younger patients.
We can expand to addiction treatments, where a delay means a toxin is causing rapid harm.
Created with joshua sorkin, who wrote twilio api code.
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