Inspiration
One of the issues many patients face is they lack sufficiently reliable information on the qualities of medical services of different hospitals and medical care centers. In order to help them to resolve this problem, we come up with the idea of building an App that fetches information of medical care qualities from reliable datasets and recommend hospitals and medical centers to users. The datasets we use is MEDICARE HOSPITAL COMPARE DATASET, which compares the quality of care at over 4000 Medicare-certified hospitals across the country.
What it does
Login or sign up in the main page, the user's first name, last name, email and password would be collected and saved on Cloud Firestore database (which is powered by Firebase) for later login check. After successful login or signup, the user would be guided to the search page. On this page, he/she can use Google map to locate his/her position, he/she can also specify search radius within which medical centers and hospitals would be fetched from the MEDICARE HOSPITAL COMPARE DATASET. Then the user would be displayed with the distances and names of the hospitals and medical centers. Upon clicking on a specific hospital name, he could get the route on how to get to that hospital or medical center. Detailed information including address in text form, as well as overall rating of the facility would also be offered to the user.
How we built it
We started from defining different functionalities we would like to achieve. Then we dice deep into the corresponding components our app should include for those functionalities. Our implementation is in Xcode. We implement the backend using Google Firebase. More specifically, we user Firebase authentication library for user login and signup, and Firestore to store user information. We choose Firebase out of the consideration of reliability and stability. To fetch hospital and medical center information, we call API offered by the MEDICARE HOSPITAL COMPARE DATASET by giving a URL including the geolocation information of the user and the search radius defined by him/her. We've also added the functionalities of displaying route to the hospital and rating of it after the user pick one from the search results.
Challenges we ran into
The backend part was kind of challenging since neither of us had used Firebase as backend previously. But we made to learn how to use it and integrated with our Swift codes. Also using MapView in Xcode to locate user was hard at the beginning since we had not used this component previously. Debugging in the TableView part for displaying hospitals was really tricky. Last but not least: Hold on and don't give up!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of the persistence both team members demonstrate under pressure. Both of us were newbies for some of the technologies in this project but we stood together and managed to accomplish the goals we set at the beginning. We're proud of the great collaboration between us and valued that as a great experience to learn how to work together with a short deadline. Last but not least, we are happy that we've managed to deliver something that is practical and can help solving a real health and wellness problem.
What we learned
A lot. We've learned new technologies and tools. We've learned how to be well disciplined under pressure. We've also learned how to collaborate and accomplish tasks with a short deadline.
What's next for Hospital Recommendation Application
We would like further improve our UI design, offering more information on hospitals and medical centers. Another useful feature we consider to implement is to cache the search history of user locally in user's device. Then next time when he enters the app he can just check out the past search results if he wants instead of locating and searching again. Also adding features like making appointments to visit the hospital or medical center in the app, rating for the hospital the user has visited in our app will be part of the future work.
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