Healthy Connections

Connecting Doctors with patients and the world for medical trials, job openings, and more!

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💻 Domain Name

healthyconnections.tech (registered with domain.com)

💡 Inspiration

I was inspired to build Healthy Connections when I saw the theme of this hackathon; I immediately wanted to build ambitious and unique. When I was brainstorming ideas I wanted to think outside of the box and for this reason I decided to move away from the idea of a fitness tracker or a fitness planner, this is how I came up with an app that connects doctors to their patients and to the world to make life for medical professionals easier and to create a centralised location for medical trial listings and job openings in the health sector!

👷‍♂️ What it does

Healthy Connections is the platform that connects Doctors to patients, and the world!

Healthy Connections is a web application which you can login to access medical trial listings and job openings posted by doctors, or if you are an approved doctor on the platform, you can post your own.

Medical trials are listed by using the button in the 'doctor's tools' toolbar labelled 'Create an ad for a Medical Trial'. Upon clicking, doctors are taken to a form where they can name their trial and give any information on it. Once submitted it is pushed to a standard MySQL database along with other data such as the current time (UTC), the doctor's username, the doctor's email address, the doctors phone number and other useful data.

Patients and doctors alike apply to trials by finding one in the dashboard/trial list and selecting 'view trial' where they can then view all the info publicly available on the trial. A button is then shown at the bottom of the content, upon clicking this button sends two texts (via Twilio). One text is sent to the doctor who listed the trial, with all the data on the applicant, such as their full name, email address, and phone number. A second text is sent to the applicant with confirmation that their application was received.

Job openings are listed by using the button in the 'doctor's tools' toolbar labelled 'Create an job for a doctor'. Upon clicking, doctors are taken to a form where they can name their job opening and give any information on it. Once submitted it follows the same protocol as posting a trial as mentioned above.

Applications work in the same way for job openings as they do for medical trial applications.

TL;DR

  • Anyone can create a standard account (this does not have permission to post listings)
  • Doctors can post medical trial ads or job openings.
  • Anyone with an account can make an application to the doctor who created the listing!
  • Applications are sent via text using Twilio to the doctor.
  • A secondary text is sent to the applicant as a confirmation of application.

❓ How I built it

I built the main website/web app of Healthy Connections using PHP, utilising a USB drive as a XAMPP apache server. I wrote all my own CSS for styling the website and utilised inline JavaScript to make the navbar opening and collapsing smoothly animated. To integrate with Twilio I used webhooks hosted on Autocode which runs using AWS Lambda Functions. I sent the webhook data using PHP and then received it easily with Autocode's simple to use IDE setup, I then built the text system within Autocode using their package lib which makes it easy to connect to a range of APIs such as Twilio using NodeJS.

Technologies:

  • JavaScript
  • NodeJS
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • PHP
  • Autocode (AWS)

⚡ Challenges I ran into

I initially built a login system however I was unable to access $_SESSION variables with it and therefore after 3 hours of non-stop hacking I had to rebegin my project which was a set back, however I was able to pull back and build a new system which was functional.

I later had some difficulty creating the index page to only show the dashboard if a user was logged in, however I managed to get this working on localhost.

Creating the webhook data sender for applications was a difficult task, however after a short time I was able to get this working and re-tailor the code to provide all the necessary data needed to send a text via Twilio using Autocode.

🌈 Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am immensely proud that I was able to program and develop an entire Full Stack app in less than 48 hours, I have only recently started to do back end development and therefore this is an amazing achievement to have produced this project.

I am also proud of my ability to create a fully responsive design in such little time without using external libraries and frameworks.

👨‍🎓 What I learned

  • I learned a lot about how backend languages, specifically PHP work.
  • I learned a lot more about the fundamentals of programming.
  • I learned how to send data to a webhook with PHP.
  • I learned how to use Twilio's API to send text alerts.
  • I learned more about SQL databases and how to access different rows and how to find the correct row.

📅 What's next for Healthy Connections

I plan to work on the security of logins and form submissions for Healthy Connections. I also plan to build a way for Doctors and patients to connect and for prescriptions, appointments and more to all be sent as text alerts using Healthy Connections. I would also like to work on the design of Healthy Connections and make it more appealing.

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