HelpNow: Pediatrics

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project came from my personal experiences supporting my younger sister after her diagnosis with type 1 diabetes. Post-diagnosis, our family was flooded with unending questions—about diet, insulin dosing, long-term complications, and especially how to recognize emergencies. Some situations that initially seemed minor, such as nausea combined with fatigue or rapid breathing, could actually be signs of diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), a potentially life-threatening complication. These experiences highlighted the need for a reliable, accessible resource that could provide patients and caregivers with accurate, condition-specific information.

What it does

• HelpNow: Pediatrics is a digital health platform designed for families of children with chronic conditions. It provides instant, personalized care guidance through two main features:
• Daily Management – an AI chatbot for everyday questions, personalized to each child’s diagnosis and medications, with symptom tracking and community support.
• Help Now Button – a triage tool that collects symptoms, sends them to a condition-specific specialist for review, and facilitates a quick 10–20 minute video consult to determine whether home care, urgent care, or an ER visit is needed.
• By connecting families directly with their specialists, HelpNow reduces unnecessary ER visits, saves costs for hospitals, and ensures safer, faster care for children.

How we built it

We began by identifying the challenges families face when managing pediatric chronic illnesses and the parallel inefficiencies in healthcare systems. Using this research, we structured our platform around two key workflows: family access and provider access. We designed the interface and flow using the information from our pitch deck and built a prototype with Lovable.dev — a low-code tool that generated a responsive web app including:

• A landing page summarizing the problem and solution
• A patient dashboard for symptom tracking and AI triage
• A provider dashboard for reviewing cases and tracking savings

The result is a functional prototype that visualizes how families and providers interact within one secure, HIPAA-compliant system.

Challenges we ran into

• Balancing the needs of families and healthcare providers on one unified platform.
• Ensuring the AI triage concept aligned with HIPAA-compliant design principles.
• Converting complex health data and ROI examples into a simple, accessible interface.
• Limited time to develop a fully functional AI model and integration pipeline.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Designed a complete, patient-centered healthcare platform from concept to prototype.
• Created a realistic ROI model showing how hospitals can save up to $3M annually by reducing unnecessary ER visits.
• Developed a visually engaging, user-friendly demo website using Lovable.dev.
• Demonstrated how AI can safely augment pediatric care without replacing human specialists.

What we learned

• How to clearly define a healthcare problem from both patient and provider perspectives.
• The importance of combining empathy-driven design with cost-effectiveness.
• How to build and present an MVP using AI-based development tools.
• Real-world understanding of how B2B subscription models apply in healthcare.

What's next for HelpNow: Pediatrics

• Launch pilot programs with 2–3 pediatric hospitals to validate outcomes and cost savings.
• Add support for more chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and sickle cell disease.
• Integrate secure patient data uploads and authentication for providers.
• Expand partnerships with insurance companies for nationwide scaling.

Built With

• chatgpt
• lovable.dev