community-health

Inspiration

a medical emergency.

Improving the quality of wellness checks by training surrounding communities to perform simple procedures that may have a significant impact on the survivability of such populations and deploying medical equipment close to them for use by community members and official first responders alike.

Local community pools resources and chooses members homes to deploy them in. Since communities often aggregate together due to shared experiences, we have situations wherein addicts might live close to other addicts, seniors close to other seniors and so on.

A community will sign up to the program on a subscription basis. Federal and State programs like Medicare, Medicaid etc another potential source of income for equipment acquisition and training.

What it does

This is a community health service. 

This utility tracks and helps develop medical expertise and place emergency medical equipment closer to vulnerable populations, in an effort to reduce response times.

A community member will place an SOS request via their Web device. A POST /incident/create HTTP request will create an incident and use Firebase Cloud Messaging to send a push notification to all registered devices. These incidents will be displayed on their Web dashboard.

From the dashboard, in real time, an agent will pick the case up and start responding. 

In further iterations, cases may be classified based on proximity to required medical equipment and medical expertise(such as CPR, Heimlich Manouevure etc.) possessed by the agent.

What does it do?

In remote areas, owing to less population density, health resources are often spread out, which has an effect on response times., particularly for vulnerable populations.

Times for ‘health-checks’ often exceeds a few hours in such areas.

Remote and rural areas also consist of a disproportionate number of people at risk, such as the elderly, the disabled and drug addicts, due to several socioeconomic factors.

According to several studies by the National Institutes of Health, survival rates for drug overdose, heart attacks and other emergency medical events can be considerably improved through the use of preventative health services.

How we built it

Tech stack Backend :- FastAPI, MongoDB Frontend :- NextJS Messaging:- Google Firebase Messaging for Push Notifications

Challenges we ran into

I had never worked with fast-api or Firebase Cloud Messaging. The specifications for FCM had changed over the past few months and the documentation was not complete, so had to use a starter app provided by Google to set up the communication. By the time I resolved that, I ran out of time. But I was determined to build a scalable solution although I could have built an MVP using a normal API with dashboards auto-refreshing much faster, because I wanted to learn about FCM, real-time event driven architectures and server push. I could not finish in time, but I am glad I had an idea and gave it a shot.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that I was resolute in building the project using the more complex, but more scalable and performant architecture that was outside my area of expertise. I could not finish it, but I learnt a lot along the process.

What we learned

I learnt about fast-api, Firebase Cloud Messaging and event-driven architectures.

What's next for community-health

This only demonstrates the key concept, which is the underlying use of push notifications. The current concept only works with Web Dashboards. To facilitate shorter response times, some approaches will require subscription to paid services, which will need time to set up and activate. Some ways of achieving this would be 1 Subscription to the Whatsapp Business API to send out emergency broadcasts. A Free API for the same does not exist, to my knowledge. 2 Publishing an app to the App Store, that agents and subjects can download. IOS devices can be integrated to the Firebase Cloud Messaging Service easily through Swift. 3 Using Google’s Free API, emails can be sent, but that would only work if the recipients have mailboxes or the Gmail app with notifications enabled this is not a scalable solution.

A community could sign up to the program on a subscription basis. Federal and State programs like Medicare, Medicaid etc another potential source of income for equipment acquisition and training.

Built With

• fastapi
• firebase
• javascript
• nextjs