DOCANDU: COVID19 Checker

Inspiration

As we have been already working on digitisation solutions for the health industry for the last 3 years, docandu, it was a no-brainer for us to expand the docandu platform to support the government's response on COVID-19 and provide citizens with an easy way to get peace of mind or real-time medical support.

What it does

Identifies coronavirus symptoms and associated risk, provides reliable guidance, and connects qualified patients with a doctor for further assistance (via call-back). The solution is delivered via web widget and mobile app for the end-user, while it includes an admin platform for the medical team to manage the stream of incoming calls.

How I built it

The docandu COVID checker was based on the work of the same medical and technical teams that built the initial docandu portfolio:

Medical research was conducted to develop the use cases and consolidate the relevant information (offical guidance from WHO and medical journals) in order to provide responses reflecting the correlation of symptoms to the probability of a COVID-19 infection, as well as qualify patients for further medical contact via call-back.
The technical solution comprises: a. server-side functions using PHP and the Laravel web framework b. the javascript framework Vue.js was used on the front-end side (micro-appraisal of symptom evaluation, recall table) c. all data is stored in MySQL (MariaDB) database

Challenges I ran into

Docandu has been in existence for the past 3 years, aiming at digitizing health services (tech health) in Greece, with telemedicine [remote symptom checking, online consultation, Electronic Health Records (EHR)] being the main innovations. Similar to the COVID-19 effort, the main consistent challenge for us has been the ubiquitous disbelief across the medical community, local and central government regarding the evolution of health services provisioning. The adoption and promotion of initiatives like this (not limited to docandu) can create the ideal conditions for responding efficiently to crises like this one and future ones.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Our solution helped more than 18,000 citizens and contributed to the government effort via:

Decongesting call centres & easing the NHS workload

Triage COVID19 (sorting): filtering cases and prioritising high-risk ones for a call back (voice) or online consultation (video)
Accelerating the physicians’ work with useful context based on patients’ Covid-19 Checker data
Doctors can work remotely providing advice from their home without risking their health or others

Providing reassurance & supporting citizens at scale

A user-friendly solution suitable for all ages - more than 56% of users were 40+ years old 2.Ease of mind for the ones that need it the most – 30% of users identified as vulnerable/high risk 3.Follow-up on high-risk cases or after hospital visit via online/telephone consultation

What I learned

In order to scale and move faster in times of crises, buy-in from the medical community and governmental authorities is essential.

What's next for DOCANDU

Offer COVID checker to more citizens

Expand coverage to more regions and countries, people who live abroad but maintain links to their home country, refugees and inbound/outbound tourists (requires to add more languages and expand our medical team).

Integrate COVID checker with the existing docandu platform allowing users to