Carespree Marketplace
Inspiration
The healthcare industry is one of the most massive commercial enterprises in the world, comprising a significant portion of government and consumer spending. Consequently, numerous companies have strived to innovate new platforms in healthcare technology to enhance the user experience. The latest of these platforms developed by Anthem is the Carespree App, comprising of an AI-assisted program to help diagnose an individual's condition in response to user inputs of detailed symptoms, while also providing avenues for treatment, medications, recovery time, and the option to speak with a doctor at a predefined low-cost for a virtual consultation. Another advantage of this platform is that no insurance plan is required to use the service, making it accessible to a larger population. However, users often need to search for providers through separate tools and manually search pharmacies to obtain over-the-counter (OTC) medication for treatment. Therefore, we recognize the bottlenecks in the platform in terms of enhancing user convenience and decided to integrate Anthem's challenge for designing a marketplace component with Microsoft's challenge to incorporate the Azure cloud in a specific manner.
What it does
The Carespree Marketplace that we have designed is able to take in user inputs of medications, healthcare provider specialties, and patient insurance providers and provide a list of corresponding pharmacies within a given radius that have appropriate medication in stock and/or provide a list of doctors or specialists that provide the appropriate services within your insurance network.
The web application requests for the user's location and queries the Microsoft SQL Server for information pertaining to the user's request. It is then able to isolate data for pharmacies with necessary products close to the user as well as healthcare providers in the vicinity.
The database consisting of the products sold by a particular pharmacy are intended to be constantly updated by linking the pharmacy's inventory with the database to provide accurate data regarding availability for the user. Participating pharmacies and insurance providers would purchase a subscription plan with Anthem to advertise their products/healthcare providers in the marketplace, providing a revenue stream for Anthem as well as a larger market for the clients.
With an added focus on convenience, the Carespree Marketplace serves the purpose of providing a centralized platform in conjunction with the existing Carepree app to enhance the user experience and focus on improved provision of healthcare.
How it works/how it was built
Using the Microsoft Azure WebApp (node.js) and Azure SQL Server, we designed the platform for users to input their specified parameters and incorporated a backend query to the SQL server to retrieve the corresponding information required by the user. A geolocation identifier was incorporated to determine the location of the user, and using the 'haversine' model to calculate the distance ("as the crow flies") in SQL, the relevant locations of pharmacies and health providers were filtered according to distance. In addition, the results were narrowed according to availability and sorted by price. Note: The information in the database used to test our platform is not complete and is partially representative of locations in Suwanee, GA. Not all of this data should be interpreted as updated, but rather can be used for testing the logic.
Challenges we ran into
One of the primary issues we ran into were routing issues with node.js which prevented further development of new innovations for the marketplace components. Integrating connections between the Azure WebApp and SQL Server were not as streamline as initially expected, resulting in further troubleshooting to access the databases. Datasets for pharmaceutical products are not readily available, and as such required the creation of unfinished, sample datasets.
Accomplishments we are proud of
The platform is fully functional and scalable! The elements incorporated into the WebApp simply need to be translated into the mobile app to enable essential marketplace components. We additionally designed a value proposition model to indicate the scalability and revenue streams for the project. We're also proud of taking a different approach to distance calculations rather than using existing APIs.
What we learned
This was our first time competing in HackGT and we are excited to have developed a fully functional platform that can have a positive impact on people's lives! We are proud of learning how to query databases using Microsoft SQL and integrate the queries from a web application. We have never used the majority of technologies utilized in this project, and even learned new languages to successfully construct the platform, and as such, it was a valuable learning experience to absorb this wealth of information.
Future work / What's next
We hope to gain access to databases containing comprehensive information of inventories at pharmacies as well as a comprehensive list of insurance providers and their associated providers-in-network. We also hope to translate this platform into the Carespree app and receive comments from users to determine the magnitude by which we have improved the user experience. We additionally hope to build upon these data retrieval methods using recommendation engines and search engine optimization to help the user further identify their product/service of need.
Built with
javascript, html, css, sql, node.js, microsoft, azure
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