MediCast

Trustworthy centralised real time treatment knowledge base

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The problem our project solves

When a new disease or virus is discovered and physicians need to collaborate to find good treatment plans. Sharing of knowledge becomes vital in crisis. Often collaboration and sharing of knowledge and experiences is silo-ed between medical professional groups both at local, regional and cross border levels. Medical professionals do not have a trusted online global community that is easy to access yet ensures members are validated.

Knowledge is typically shared in a tribal manner within small groups or using online services where trust and reliability of the information can be a concern.

Easy to access online groups hosted on platforms such as Facebook or via apps such as Figure1 are really good for real-time communication but not very reliable, no checks, not easy to detect trusted sources.

Consulting National and International medical societies are a good and reliable source of information but it needs to be validated, peer reviews, etc which can take a long time leading to a lag before knowledge is widely shared.

Our Solution

A centralised and secure cloud based platform that allows medical professional to quickly share treatment protocols and experiences between each other independent of their location.

The platform assures that trust is maintained through validation of all community contributors via integrations with various government databases for medical professionals registration.

Core platform features include the below;

  • Easy treatment sharing via simple forms supported on multi mobile devices as well as via an extensive web application.

  • Ability to report observations and collaborate on treatment experiences without capturing any personal data related to patients. Personas are used to represent patients with no data stored that would allow a living individual to be identified

  • Role-based access. Users with knowledge (Doctors and other medical professionals) get access to share and collaborate on the platform. Other users just get read access. Manual validation for more access.

  • Secure and Trusted authentication via login and user validation against medical staff databases. Medical professionals are allowed to self register however before their access is granted they are validated via an integration to national medical staff databases (current support for Benelux, other regions planned).

  • For non-medical professionals read access is allowed, non-medical professionals are not allowed to post or contribute to content.

  • Automated tagging (using Natural Language Understanding to automatically tag posts in order to improve searching)

  • System to rate posts and users in order to highlight more effective/reliable treatments.

  • APIs for inbound and external system connectivity to other relevant healthcare systems such as pubmed.

What it does

Provides a trusted collaborative platform for medical professionals to share experiences related to patient treatment. Integrates with existing data sources to unlock insights and facilitate knowledge sharing.

Our Inspiration

We were inspired by the health care workers around the world risking their lives daily to help in the current COVID19 crisis. Our team had a strong desire to use our technical skills for the greater good.

What we have done during the weekend

Spoken to experts, designed and built a prototype of the application showcasing some of the core features.

How we built it

We used an enterprise strength cloud platform called ServiceNow and built our application on top of this platform. There are a number of reasons we decided to use the ServiceNow enterprise cloud platform, including but not limited to;

  • It is highly secure, refer to the ServiceNow Trust website for more details of their regulatory support and other information related to the platforms security found here; https://www.servicenow.nl/company/trust.html

  • It is already used by many healthcare organizations around the world ranging from pharma companies such as AstraZeneca, and diagnostics and imaging such as Roche and Agfa HealthCare as well as hospitals

  • Is one of the highest ranked cloud platforms in terms of availability, refer to ServiceNows High Availability white paper here; https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/resource-center/white-paper/wp-sn-advanced-high-availability-architecture.pdf

  • It provides many capabilities, building blocks such as natural language understanding, tagging, knowledge management, social Q&A and APIs which we could re-use to very quickly build an industry strength solution

  • It is easy and quick to deploy, once a ServiceNow instance has been provisioned our application can be installed and up and running within minutes.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

Promote better decisions and patient care through sharing of knowledge and inter-medical group collaboration.

Challenges we ran into

  • Balancing simplicity and structure:

    • We wanted to create a very simple and easy form to submit treatment protocols but at the same time collect a lot of details such as (diseases, symptoms, age, remedies, etc);

  • Balancing privacy/security and accessibility:

    • We wanted to create a platform that validates the users that add content to it (medical professional, etc) but at the same time be easy to access (complicated validation forms, long waiting times, etc)

  • Finding large open datasets for diseases, symptoms, treatments and remedies to use in our natural language understanding tool;

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the ability of our team to learn about new topics and apply their technical skills to solve problems outside of our day to day lives.

What we learned

We learned a lot regarding challenges within the medical community related to sharing of knowledge and lack of trust when using the typical online communities often hosted on platforms such as Facebook.

What's next for MediCast

Our roadmap includes;

  • Extended integrations to validate against more region medical staff databases
  • Natural Language Understanding enhancements
  • Dynamic Tag generation
  • Advanced Analytics and Trend analysis/detection
  • Multi Language Support
  • Enhanced Validation Process
  • Extended reach into other medical groups, e.g. care-givers
  • Provided better tailored content via grouping and aggregation
  • Platform moderation (automated and human)
  • Extended mobile device support, integration with SIRI
  • Perform data queries on external sources for analysis
  • Integration with external medical publication and scientific databases

Access to the platform to test the tool

Validation of the Medical register number is currently only working for the “Dutch government medical register”: https://english.bigregister.nl/

Registration process:

  1. Go to https://dev99360.service-now.com/care
  2. If you have a login already, you can just log in and will be landing on the homepage
  3. If you have no account, Click on ‘Register’
  4. Fill in your email address and password.
  5. If you are a medical (Dutch medical) professional, you can use your BIG register number (use 29914775101)
  6. Click on “register” after filling in every information.
  7. Click on the “MediCast” logo or go back to https://dev99360.service-now.com/care
  8. Login in with your credentials
  9. Start reading and helping the community
  • If your BIG register number is not validated, you won’t be able to edit or post new treatments. You can still read the discussions and information
  • If your BIG register number is validated, you will be able to edit, post and help colleagues improvement treatments or theories.
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