Inspiration
Seth works at a home infusion pharmacy supplying patients in a large medical chain! Home infusion is a special type of pharmacy where the IV medications and the supplies necessary to infuse them are sent to your home so less time is spent in the hospital. In the past, his pharmacy would send a “standard supply” box every week. This practice was changed recently due to monetary losses from excess supplies being sent to patients. Their current policy is to have the patient count their supplies with weekly phone calls. While this works, it also increases the length of phone calls to 5-15 minutes for each patient, as well as causing unnecessary burden on the patient; it’s pretty inefficient. Not to mention patient confusion over what some of the supplies are even called, making inventory difficult, and this process being time-consuming and intrusive.
What it does
When a patient infuses, they can document the use of their supplies with live feedback being sent to the pharmacy; this saves the pharmacy from sending out excess supplies, and also serves as an indicator of adherence/patient utilization or under/overutilization of materials. It also shows user information for supplies and medications, in case the patient is unsure which supply is which. Pictures are provided so the consumer can easily match their product to their live inventory. There is also a personalized treatment button, where patients are able to see their personalized regimen, in case they ever need to share that information with a caretaker. This saves time for the patient because now, they don't have to struggle with identifying supplies every single week and taking a long time on the phone to just tell the pharmacists how many 22G x 3/4 needles, for example, they have left.
How we built it
The CS majors are definitely able to describe it better than I can, but it involved a lot of hard work on their end!
Challenges we ran into
Practicality versus functionality was a big debate on our end, since we only had 48 hours. Since this was designed with a specific pharmacy in mind, keeping it general enough that it could be adapted to other pharmacies was also an issue. The CS majors did really well coding and fixing issues that popped up along the way. We were originally planning on uploading it all to a domain; however, we encountered issues with domain.com that the support team couldn't resolve, so we decided to not upload it. However, that was the last step that needed to be taken otherwise.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our CS majors built a functioning login system as well as learned from each other's respective strong suits, ending up with a pretty cohesive project that can be demo'd currently. One of our CS majors had never done a show/hide toggle for images before, so that was new knowledge learned.
What we learned
Us pharmacy majors really appreciated the amount of hard work the CS majors put in, as well as their expertise needed to design various aspects of each component.
What's next for InfuTrack
We'd update the profile with products with matching NDC's, as well as add on adherence monitoring functionality to our current existing utilization feedback.
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