C.H.E.S.T. (Community Health Education Support Team)

The C.H.E.S.T. crew

Inspiration

While developing our team during the pitching session, we were drawn together by our similar interests in the user need and social implications of to combat lack of medical staffing and resources in third world countries. As such, we focused on defining a problem before ideating and generating solutions, keeping the user needs in mind always. We also noticed after discussing with the JHPIEGO mentors that there is currently a gap between the clinical centers and rural communities. Our main inspiration is to bridge that gap as a way of maximizing efficient resource distribution and health literacy.

What it does

C.H.E.S.T. is a solution to create a data analysis system that will support evidence-based NGO decision making in recommending community health worker education, and ultimately strengthening public health systems. We programmed a system that collects Whatsapp activity data in remote communities between community health workers and the community and sends it to the control centers located in more urban areas of the country. The data from multiple communities can then be analyzed to determine the specific health problems in each community and what educational interventions need to be sent out. These tailored results will support the community health workers with their primary issues and make the NGO's resource distribution more efficient overall. In the long-term, the system can track changes pre- and post- educational intervention in each community, and measure the NGO's impact on community education and public health awareness of specific issues like post-op self-care.

How we built it

The C.H.E.S.T. technical solution is split into 3 parts, 1) Text extraction from a groupchat, 2) Text analysis and topic grouping, and 3) Data visualization by topic frequency.

Challenges we ran into

In the health facilities of developing countries, the limited staffing and resources made it challenging for our team to generate a technical solution that would be feasible in these scenarios. We wanted to ensure that our solution would lessen the burden rather than unintentionally increase the burden, so we always kept these limitations in mind during our ideation phase. Another challenge our group faced was deciding between two topics to direct our solution, which was to take a technical approach in quantifying user need or a social approach to educate the families of patients. We overcame this challenge by deciding to incorporate aspects of both topics in our solution.

On the technical side, we experienced a plethora of challenges in the execution of our solution. As first time API and domain users, our team felt challenged with the technical implementation of our hack at our first hackathon. We experienced failure many times and were forced to adapt our implementation according to the technologies we were able to utilize.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our open-minded approach and our design process. We found it was very effective to start by defining a specific problem rather than just jumping into a solution, which allowed us to address the specific issues that the end-user has and consider the many challenges of designing in this context. We actively sought out mentors and resources to aid in our understanding of the healthcare environment in these countries and jhpiego's challenges. We were not afraid to take on risks and try new software platforms to create the technical proof-of-concept of our solution. As a group, we were able to establish efficient communication and encourage positive team dynamics, which enhanced our overall design process.

What we learned

We gained a more accurate perspective of healthcare in developing countries and how to problem-solve around user needs despite the limitations in resources and medical staff. Our team also learned how to use domains and APIs while we were building our solution.

What's next for C.H.E.S.T. (Community Health Education Support Team)

The C.H.E.S.T. team formed after the track pitches, and we did not know each other before MedHacks. As students, we are all looking to develop our technical skills to continue to tackle real world challenges! We hope that jhpiego will draw some inspiration from C.H.E.S.T., and potentially implement parts of our solution.