The problem your project solves
The transformation towards a citizen-centric world is emerging. In order to remain efficient, trusted and competitive, governments are facing pressure to adjust their strategies so that citizens are placed at the center of their policies and public service delivery.
Public health emergencies – such as COVID-19 – affect the health, safety and well-being of both individuals and communities. The potential of citizen science for tracking health epidemics and people’s sentiments on the situation is still largely untapped.
Alongside people’s physical and mental health symptoms, it is also important to understand the performance of healthcare systems across the world. The performance of national healthcare systems during the crisis – as perceived by the people – varies a lot and we lack useful tools for international comparisons.
The solution you bring to the table
Healthrate provides a free and genuinely easy-to-use rating tool which allows individuals to report anonymously:
- how they feel about their healthcare system’s response to the situation
- how they experience COVID-19’s most commonly associated symptoms (fever, cough and shortness of breath)
- what is their general mood
As a result a global heatmap is created to visualize how people actually feel about their situation and their healthcare system’s response to it.
To facilitate data collection and engagement, additional insights and analytics are shared immediately with anyone who submits a report.
As health data is considered sensitive data, Healthrate takes a strong position on people’s privacy. No registration is needed and no directly personal data is collected. All location data is obfuscated to protect privacy.
For the public sector, collected citizen sentiment data is analysed for actionable insights. Aggregated data will be made freely available via a public API for anyone to use.
What you have done during the weekend
With invaluable help from our mentors, we managed to accomplish quite a lot. Our mentors were mainly psychologists, doctors, user experience and business development specialists.
To summarize our main accomplishments, we:
- Developed and implemented a general sentiment model for collecting any sentiment data and deployed it to our testing environment
- Designed and improved our initial assessments for collecting citizen sentiment data on healthcare performance
- Reviewed our application’s user experience (UX) for immediate improvements
- Gained insights for developing and improving user engagement features and strategies
- Networked with people from a wide variety of disciplines
The solution’s impact on the crisis
A citizen science approach to the pandemic brings many benefits. Collecting data from citizens:
- Engages citizens in the data collection process and improves community awareness and action during COVID-19
- Provides a cost-effective alternative for traditional, costly and time-consuming methods of collecting and reporting patient data
- Helps to monitor psychosocial needs and deliver support for risk areas. For example, the pandemic is likely to have both long- and short-term implications for mental health and substance use.
- Helps to identify healthcare areas that need improvement
- Gives possibility to derive actionable insights for policy design and healthcare delivery when going forward
- Can lead to improvements in operational efficiency and lower costs – and create more resources for fighting the pandemic
- Can lead to improved citizen happiness and thus provide indirect benefits also within government structures
The necessities in order to continue the project
Baseline: 300K € worth of funding or applicable resources for the next 3-6 months to accelerate development of the platform, accomplish sentiment validation and to prepare for global scale sentiment data collection.
After 6 months additional 300K € to cover infrastructure costs, improve platform maturity and create data analytics to empower communities around the world.
After 12 months we look at what we have accomplished and decide next steps.
The value of your solution after the crisis
Our vision is to establish an open source platform that can collect and analyse any sentiment data related to the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – beyond the acute COVID-19 pandemic.
As a part of that vision, Healthrate will continue to accelerate and support countries’ progress on the health-related Sustainable Development Goals.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.