Code Red

An app designed to increase the effectiveness of the emergency room

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Inspiration

According to the CDC, nearly 136 million patients visit emergency rooms in the United States every year. From minor scares to life-threatening injuries, emergency room receptionists deal with tons of emergency cases round the clock. Regardless of whether or not patients come in an ambulance or through the front door, ER receptionists are required to assess every patient and page the necessary doctors. Managing these important responsibilities is a tall task for these workers, especially when minor delays can have major consequences for patients on the verge of life or death. In order to assist ER receptionists, we decided to create Code Red, which would allow nurses to more effectively manage emergency cases.

What it does

The primary purpose of Code Red is to bridge the gap between citizens, paramedics, doctors, and ER receptionists. Code Red allows information about emergency cases to go straight from paramedics and citizens attending the scene to the doctors working at that hospital, thus eliminating the extra time that ER receptionists take in order to find potential doctors for specific cases.

How we built it

The foundation of Code Red is centered around two separate products. The website, which is built in React, contains an interface for emergency room receptionists to more effectively communicate with citizens, paramedics, and doctors. On the other side, our mobile application, which is built with Swift, was created to allow the aforementioned audiences to communicate information about emergency cases with the ER interface.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges we ran into while coding this project was creating users on the website. Although google authentication was fairly simple to setup, we needed to associate several pieces of information to each user (outside of just the email that was stored through the authentication). This forced us to have to redirect the user to onboarding screens after the registration process so that we could obtain the required information. This challenge was worth overcoming since it allowed our client application (the mobile app) to have access to more important information about emergencies.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team was proud of being able to pass audio between our mobile application and our web application. This was an issue that we had lots of problems with since the use of different platforms in our project caused several incompatibilities when it came to storing audio files in Firebase Storage. However, after experimenting with several different audio file types, we were finally able to find one that worked with both platforms, thus allowing us to properly pass audio between our products.

What we learned

Throughout this hackathon, we greatly improved on our collaboration skills. Trying to create two different applications in one project was an extremely ambitious idea, especially considering the length of the coding window; however, this forced us to be more organized and productive as a team. We even gained a lot of experience in using development tools such as Figma and Taskade, which allowed us to create designs and assign tasks to each of our team members. Overall, this hackathon was a great experience for us as it also gave us some insight into how hospital management works.

What's next for Code Red

After this hackathon, we are planning to touch up all of the features in Code Red and get it ready for deployment. If possible, we also want to demo our project in nearby hospitals and get feedback from real emergency room receptionists.

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