Inspiration
Our team’s story:
During the early stage of the pandemic, Vietnam was one of the countries that shared a border with China, so it has been a big concern for both the government and its people that how a small third-world country with limited resources could ever fight this Coronavirus?
My team members and I were really amazed by how our people and the policies that have been applied to fight the pandemic really worked. I believe that the proactive care of our government and our health care workers also played an important role in fighting the pandemic.
Then this idea came to my mind, what if we can even be more proactive in testing the patients? What if we can let our people get consulted online and alert the hospital or the Ministry of Health before they go to a random hospital to get tested without prior notification.
In that case, we can prevent the spreading of the pandemic, by:
- Patients don’t spread the virus on the way to the hospital because the health care professionals will go to their house with full gear.
- The hospital knows about the patient’s condition in advance so they can apply pandemic protocol properly and evacuate a certain area instead of a whole hospital.
- Save time and resources for both patients, doctors and health care professionals since they can rule out suspected cases or get prepared better for the infected cases.
Therefore, we got really inspired to make this online consult center through Messenger to connect patients with doctors/health care professionals so that we can prevent the pandemic. This is how our product comes to life and we hope with more time and preparation, this product will actually become a useful solution for our health care system.
What it does
This application is an online portal where certified health care professionals will be connected with patients to get consulted. Patients can ask questions and doctors/consultants can answer them in real time through Messenger. Below are some features that we built:
- Patients can choose a menu of questions to get started
- Patients can a ask questions and get answered by doctors
- Patients can leave ratings for the answers/the doctor…
- Patients can notify the doctor about their symptoms and choose “I want to get tested” if they have Covid-19 symptoms and they will get full consultation where to get tested, what to go, ects…
- Doctors can log in to the system to pick the questions or categories that they want to answer and get notified on Facebook Page Inbox when their patients reply.
- Doctors and patients can end the conversation when they want.
How I built it
We used PHP and Facebook API to build the backend of the app and nodejs+socket to build the real time chat room to connect patients and doctors. For the database, we used postgres to store users and doctors data. In addition, to build the question categories, we use Message webview and finally, we use Messenger template messages to allow users rate their doctors and end chat.
Challenges I ran into
The biggest challenge we faced is the urgent timeline of this project, since we knew about this hackathon quite late so we have to put a lot of effort in a short period of time to finish it. We actually only have 4 members to develop this project in 7 days with extra time after work. Moreover, it was quite new to us concerning developing base on a lot of Messenger APIs. We also have to learn about deep learning to be able to assign and map between users and experts, which is also a big challenge to us.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We're proud that we were able to build this application in such a short period of time when we first thought that we will never be able to make it. We’re also proud that this product actually means a lot to us since it’s a product we built for brothers and sisters in healthcare who are in the frontier. It’s the least we can do to help them fight this pandemic but if it gets implemented, we’re proud we can be a part of it.
What I learned
Overall, we learned more about the Facebook API and Messenger API, we also learn to improve our team work in general since it’s important to make such product like this possible in a short period of time.
What’s next for i-Consult
We hope that we can have more time to further develop this product. There are some ideas that we have in our mind to make this app better and even more useful:
- We want to build a community where experts, consultants, health care professionals and doctors connect with each other to make friends, raise medical questions and create new ideas, they also can assign the questions for others.
- The app will allow consultants integrate e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Woo Commerce...so they could introduce users with certified merchandise for healthcare...to the one who is in need.
- We will also use AI to auto-assign, mapping between consultants and users based on the chat history, healthcare record, category history.
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