MediChat - A slack for doctors and patients

Talk and treat remote. This tool comes handy when doctors are taking care of a large number of patients and communication between the patient and the doctor can take place remotely.

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Inspiration

India facing shortage of 600,000 doctors, 2 million nurses: Study says that out-of-pocket medical costs to the patient are compounded by limited government spending for health services, according to the report by the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy (CDDEP) in the US

Due to the pandemic, a large number of people are not able to travel to the medical facility or dispensary or seek medical advice to to huge number of COVID cases and spread of the virus and shutdown of hospitals facilities to accompdate COVID patients. Also due to the shortage of nurses, there are not enough caretakers for patients at home especially the elderly/children in remote areas. Also due to the huge patient intake and less number of caretakers/doctors, medical professionals are facing a burnout. Doctors can't handle countless phonecalls, and attend each patient personally.

Burnout takes a toll on physicians, their patients, and their practices. Short visits, complicated patients, lack of control, electronic health record stress, and poor work-home balance can lead to physicians leaving practices they once loved, poor patient outcomes, and shortages in primary care physicians.

What it does

We provide a common platform for doctors and nurses to form health groups/channels like diabetes, mental health, COVID-19, etc so that patients suffering from a common disease can signup and meet doctors from differnet parts of the country and the world and seek medical advice.

We also provide a private chat feature where the patients can personally message other patients, doctors as private chat and get their personal health, problems solved.

Thus with this system we can raise a general health awareness among the population of the country which can help curb or prevent the spread of viruses and other infections by seeking medical guidance from health experts.

How we built it

A remote realtime chatspace for patients and doctors made with ReactJS, Redux, React-Semantic-UI, web-Sockets & Firebase. This tool comes handy when doctors are taking care of a large number of patients and shared communication between the patient and the doctor can take place remotely.

Challenges we ran into

Adding Redux, state management and Real time scrolldown to view newest chats. Also displaying visibility status of users registered on the platform, adding timestamp and elapsed time of conversation, changing UI colors of the interface which can be adjustible to suit the color comfortable to the eye( especially for patients suffering from color-blindness)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Register and Login
  2. Create channels for health and discuss important health issues.
  3. Share health tips, prescriptions, directions for medication, etc
  4. Chat privately
  5. upload media in JPG, PNG format, can be used to share medicine photos, prescriptions, etc.
  6. Star your favorite channels for referring and using later
  7. Change your avatar and also see if the other users are available(online) for chat, so that the patients can solve their health issues online in real time.
  8. See message timestamp and elapsed time of conversation
  9. Auto scroll using Search feature to see and previous messages, newest conversations
  10. Support for patients with Color Blindness( color vision deficiency) : Our UI also allows patients to change the primary and secondary UI colors so that they can clearly distinguish between the elements present in the UI and choose an interface with colors friendly to the eye

What we learned

I learn to work with Firebase with React Apps and explored bits of Semantic UI styling library for React front-end. I also learnt about the MIME protocol for uploading media to the app.

What's next for MediChat - A slack for doctors and patients

  1. Implementing a news section wherein people get daily updates about trends in medicine, COVID cases by calling an external APIs.

  2. Implementing Speech to text NLP engine wherein we can leverage Natural Language Processing techniques and tools like Facebook's Wit.ai to capture the intent of the doctors communicated message and update patient records in the UI in discrete fields like medical prescription, surgery, patient history, along with the timestamp, so that doctors don't face a burnout by having to spend time writing patient records on paper/documents but it can be updated using Speech to Text.

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