MedEx

Towards better informed healthcare

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Inspiration

What it does

MedEx is a web application developed for both patients and healthcare professionals, providing patients with easy access on medical consent/ EHR information with further educational contents they care about and/ or reveal confusion on, giving suggestions on both educational portal development and guidelines on patients informed consent instructions. The two goals of MedEx are to

  1. help people understand their medical consent forms/ medical records
  2. help healthcare professionals/ researchers understand what patients need to understand in their medical documents as well as what is important to patients, and adjust their service guidelines accordingly.

Functions and Features proposed: MedEx is a platform enabling patients to interact with their medical records through functions such as in-text vocabulary searches (definitions, resources, images) and multiple language translations. Medical consent forms in PDF format will be accepted. Usage data, such as word searches and cursor activity (heat-maps) will be tracked, processed, and presented to physicians and other professionals who want to gain insight in patient education. Collected usage data and statistics can be presented in a dashboard including charts, graphs, and other visualizations, as well as in informative exportable reports. The application development mainly contains two stages: experimental data collection(experimental phase) and patients user trials (testing phase). [1] In experimental phase, a number of volunteer subjects are recruited to read medical consent forms/ EHRs and asked to highlight and search words/ phrases/ sentences they want to further explore. Their user behaviour are recorded through integration of Mouseflow API, from which heat-map for mouse movement/ clicking event tracking are generated as the raw user behavior data to be analyzed. [2] Words/ phrases/ sentences of the most interest will be extracted to comprise a baseline dictionary where each entry is matched with a list of conventional explanatory data sources (doctor definition/ wikipedia/ dynamic google search results, etc). The list of datasource will be present as a drop down menu when users in the testing phase click on a specific expression (list for common items from overlapping expressions will be merged), in which way user are able to redirect themselves to the data sources in an in-app pop-up window. The system constantly analyze real-time user behavior and dynamically adjust entries in the original dictionary of data source lists.

How we built it

The front-end framework was built using Justinmind prototyper and IntelliJ-IDEA using Javascript, css, html5.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had enough back-end fast deployment experience. Instead of connecting our back-end function with the front-end web application, we were only able to provide simple mock cases as demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Came up with a two-phase method that is able to collect information on patient interest points on medical documents and use that information to direct patient education & help modify standard medical informed consent instruction pipelines. Fast prototyping/ front-end design& deployment.

What we learned

Actively reaching out to other hackers to communicate ideas is essential to forming a functional team. Our team only had 3 person, with skills concentrated in front-end design/ medical app prototyping.

What's next for MedEx

Website-domain connection trouble-shooting/ back-end design

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