DocCom

A forum application built for doctors to discuss issues related to COVID-19, where they can post questions and get answers from others. In these times, having a community especially for doctors helps.

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Inspiration

It would be highly beneficial for doctors to have a community of their own. There they can discuss and share different aspects of various domains within the medical fraternity. It would help them to get a second opinion on various issues. For instance, if a dermatologist is prescribing a medication to a diabetic patient then he can consult a physician about the issue instantly and get multiple opinions from various experts. Also, it would help spread the knowledge of new development faster among the community.

What it does

Our idea is to develop a platform to provide a forum to the medical fraternity where they can come together and help each other out. We are developing a web application that provides this service. The web is only one facet, it can be extended to Android and other platforms. On this application users (doctors) can register, by providing credentials, to participate. Their account along with the credentials would be verified to maintain legitimacy. After registration is successfully users can put up their questions, can answer already asked questions, upvote/downvote any questions/answers they like/dislike, comment on questions/answers, can follow other users' activities, and can subscribe to various predefined topics. Each user will have their feed and personal profile. Questions can also be viewed based on topics and activity (trending). The order in which the questions would be shown on the feed will be based on the number of upvotes and time stamp of that question. Answers would be shown according to their popularity (upvotes). Users will also be provided access to their questions and answer in their profile itself in reverse chronological order.

How we built it

  • To make it platform independent we will be implementing the REST-based APIs.
  • We are using python as a primary language.
  • More specifically, we are using its web framework i.e., Django.
  • The database would be a SQL database namely SQLite3.
  • The frontend is currently being hosted as a web application that would be implemented with HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JQuery, Ajax, and React/Angular.
  • See this presentation video for more info - Design Presentation Video

Challenges we ran into

  • We have worked before on NOSQL database but in this project we design according to SQL database.
  • We never worked on Serialisers in Django for serializing data in django, so it takes time to understand those concepts and implement them in such a short span of time.

Impact

  • Making doctors aware of the appearance of new symptoms, so that they can make more effective decisions.
  • Young doctors can use the work of experienced doctors while handling difficult cases.
  • Networking of doctor, help them to learn new developments in their fields. Doctors of different specializations can collaborate and help each other out.

What's next for DocCom

  • Trending topics/questions would be cached at the backend to make the application more responsive and fast. (For that purpose, we would be using Memcache - Redis).
  • For every new question being added, there would be a scan that if a similar question has already been asked. Users could choose if they want their query to be independent or if they want to merge both threads. (This would be implemented using NLP based solution to detect any collision.)
  • We will be using a recommender system to suggest questions that are similar to the question currently being viewed by the user. (using Machine Learning based solution)
  • Tags would be suggested to the user at the time of question being added automatically. (using the lexicon and rule-based NLP tools.)
  • Notifications will be pushed to each user according to their interests and activity on their subscribed topics and followers.
  • A normal user (non-doctor) can also be added to the platform to spread awareness.
  • Each user will be provided with credits according to the popularity of their answer. It would be decided based on the number of upvotes.
  • Top writers for different topics will be decided weekly, monthly, yearly, and overall.
  • TL;DR version can be used to summarise long answers.

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