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When in emergency, prefer less panic and more a health aid
Inspiration
I have a brain medical condition and used to have seizures when I was young. I was treated by one of the nation's top doctors and took anti-epilectic medications for almost 7 years. After that, things were getting normal, and the doctor suggested that I stop taking the medicine. For almost 3 years, nothing happened. However, in 2020, things were about to take a turn. I was in a conference meeting. The last thing I remember is that I was talking about youth empowerment, and then I do not remember what happened next. After almost 18 hours, I opened my eyes. I came to know that I had seizures again. So I will tell you what that 18 hours went like, as Rohan, one of the members at the conference, explained to me.
Once I got seizures, the first thing Rohan tried was to call my parents. However, no one at the conference hall knew my parents contact information, and my phone was password protected. He couldn't contact them. So they thought the best bet would be to call an ambulance. The ambulance took me to the emergency room of the nearest hospital, and the nurses put me in the ICU, as if I was fighting for my life. The Doctor's first impression was that I might have choked myself and food might have entered my lungs. They x rayed my lungs, and after hours of diagnosis and contemplation, they found nothing. Finally, someone found my parents contact info, and only after 8 hours of the incident my parents were in the hospital. After they explained my medical conditions to the doctor, they referred me to the nearest neuro-hospital, and I was given some sleeping injection and was told to re-continue anti-epileptic medication and now am doing fine again.
One hilarious thing here is, not only all those speculation from doctors cost me more than $10,000, but I could have died if I wasn't taken to the neuro-hospital on time. Seizure is quite common, and there is nothing to worry about. However, the thing here to worry about is even in the world, where Information Technology is taking over, it was so hard for Rohan to make structured and systematic decisions, and it was almost impossible for doctors to plan their diagnosis because they were unaware about my medical condition until my parents told them. It made me think how many more people there might be in the world facing the same problem? In fact, here is the alarming fact: according to the CNBC’s reports, diagnostic delay and negligence is the 3rd leading cause of death, and that alone in the US which is equipped with one of the world’s best health care facilities and IT infrastructures. If you see a car crash down a road, as a bypasser, and see a person lying unconscious inside the car, what would be the best thing to do? Probably to call an ambulance, right? But ask yourself where the ambulance you called will take the victim to? As always, to the emergency ward or a life support chamber of any hospital, where neither the doctors or any medical staff would know what to do next since they are unaware of the victim's medical histories or even actual cause of the accident. Not only this could cost the victim more money, more time, but even his life if correct diagnosis is delayed. Moreover, lack of emotional support for the victim would be a huge negative factor since, usually family members would arrive late because they are informed late.
These incidents inspired us, or compelled us, to create this middle-man process more structured, effective, and systematic. With the help of all the advancement we have achieved in information and technology, we come up with an idea of “Get Help” that would completely eradicate those issues.
What it does
When in emergency, prefer less panic and more a health aid to the victim. We present you a health assistant mobile app that works as an emergency siren and a health document to the hospital nearby. Get Help is not just any other ordinary health app. It is a whole health automation hub in itself. With the help of “Get Help”, we want to automate everything to save the victim his time, his money(by not indulging doctors into random diagnosis to find out the real cause), and more importantly, his life. From bypassers seeing the victim in a crashed car, to informing the victim's family members, calling appropriate ambulances and health-services. From letting hospital authorities retrieve the victim's medical information in no time to updating the victim's medical records after further diagnosis, we want to automate every possible step, with Get Help.
Get Help app would generate a QR code. It would be a static QR code and would be fixed for every citizen, just like your SSN. You can either print it and keep it on your phone, or put in your national ID cards. This QR code is associated with various medical information related to the victim. For instance, it would consist of user related medication information like allergies, recent diagnosis, any chronic diseases, recent hospital visits, recent doctors visits, and the purpose behind it. It would also consist of all the medical receipts, medical documents, and reports-- like X-Ray, CT-Scans, MRIs, etc. Not only this, but it would also consist datas like emergency contacts that you could set(maybe your family members). You are also able to set emergency hospital contacts and emergency doctor contacts. These could be both specific doctor/hospital contact addresses, or it could be the type of them--like neurologists if you have chronic neuro problems and you get seizures quite often, or cardio hospital if you are prone to high blood pressure attacks.
So, once you ran into problem, other person can just scan that QR code from their Get Help mobile application, and the automation process starts from here:
First Step: As soon as the QR code is scanned, you would get 6 total phone numbers showing in your screen. Five of them would use the emergency contact set by the victim himself for such situations. And one of them would be the contact of the ambulance service. However, here is the trick. This ambulance won’t be just any random ambulance from 911. It would be the one that matches the criteria the victim has set up beforehand. For instance, if the victim has neuro-hospital type as emergency hospital contact, then the first attempt app would be to look if the specific hospital the victim has set is in near distance. If yes, it would contact the ambulance service of that hospital, if not it would contact the nearby similar hospital. Once the contact is initiated, you can now contact any of those five emergency family contacts set by the victim and let them know where the victim is being taken.
Second Step: Once you call the ambulance, the reception staff of that specific hospital would initiate their task. The Get Help app would send them the id of the victim, and they could retrieve all the medical information, reports, and other required attachments from the Get Help database, and make sure that everything is ready.
Third Step: Once the victim arrives at the hospital, the doctor would already have reviewed past medical reports and other required information and could decide what diagnosis to carry on as soon as possible. For instance, if the CT scan was just recently done, the doctor could decide not to do it again if there are no severe head injuries. Not only this saves money for the victim, but also the time.
Fourth Step: After the diagnosis is done, staff at the hospital would add new medical reports and all the necessary information to the victim’s database for future use.
In this way, not only it makes the diagnosis process systematic, but also reduces speculation and negligence by a huge margin.
How we built it
First of all we decided on a set of datas that might be needed for such conditions-- we would provide space in our app, for users, to enter these data. That includes info like but not limited to medical conditions, allergies, recent medical visits, recent doctors, etc(you can see full of it on github repo). After that we designed a schema and created a model based on that. Every user will have to go through the authentication process. During registration, the user needs to enter his email. Since emaisl are unique to everyone, for the preliminary phase of the app development, we have decided to use email for all CRUD(Creating, Reading, Updating and Deleting) operations on the database.
The database is stored on a remote server, in NoSQL structured(on mongo atlas). There are no restrictions on how many data users can store. Moreover, to make UX smoother, we have also built a very user interactive and user intuitive frontend (you can see the picture of it on github repo).
For a validation purpose, we are using email as I mentioned above. So for instance if you are entering a new set of information related to Medical Reports, then that information would be stored in the array inside the medicalReports of JSON object userInfo, as a JSON object itself. So in this way, we could use a mapping function in express to retrieve any number of those datas and showcase them in the frontend dynamically. Other updating,deleting, and adding new information would also work in the same way (where, as I mentioned, email is used to identify the dataset where it needs to be added or deleted from).
Regarding retrieving phone numbers of nearest similar hospital, we have used google maps api, that will take the keyword from “similar hospital” variable and start returning hospital name, phone numbers of ambulance, and distance from current location in the front end.
Other details I have already discussed in more detail in the above section.
Challenges we ran into
Since none of us are super familiar with web development/app development, we approached learning and doing methodology. We would watch tutorials on how to read/write databases and try to implement them on our side. Moreover, since none of us(team members) were doing this in person and were in different time zones, it was quite hard for us to maintain the healthy working spirit high.
Beside that, there were a number of bugs and crashes we encountered while developing the app. At one point we even had to scrap things and start from the very beginning since we mistakenly deleted all the source codes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Although our proposed model is not completely developed, we are so proud to come up with this unique idea and try our best to build it. The team is so proud of the immense work ethic everyone showed despite being in different time zones, cutting their sleeping time, and awaking all nights to build the Get Help app.
What we learned
We learned so many new skills regarding full stack web development. We also analyzed and got a good picture of health issues caused by different types of medical conditions and negligence, after analyzing numerous statistics and datas.
What's next for Get Help
There is still way more to go before Get Help is actually functional. We have our target product in mind and we assure that we will not stop before we actually complete it. This hackathon provided with the launch pad and our landing will be the day when we finish this project completely. For that we are planning to meet (virtually) outside of the hackathon after wards and keep working on developing this project.
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