Inspiration
Patient safety risks posed due to human errors. Patient identification errors are the largest factor leading to 13% of surgical mistakes and 14% (US data) of medical records have inaccurate, potentially dangerous patient data that can be traced to incorrect patient identification. Thus keeping track of patients in busy clinical practice is a task that is prone to human errors and leaders to thousands of loss of lives and many more minor and irreversible damages and hence we thought to fix it with innovation, medScan.
What it does
We have developed a smartphone app-based platform that uses barcodes wristbands (based on the universal patient health id we allot). The barcode when scanned using our smartphone app provides access to a patient profile that contains all the patient data: demographics, patient’s medical history, and the medicine (with dosage) prescribed to the patient during each visit by the medical staff when the patient is hospitalized. Additionally, it allows the medical staff to add specific notes and associate the specimens with patients allowing easy and clear tracking throughout the premises and beyond; leaving no room for incorrect patient identification errors. All this in just one app. The confidentiality of patient medical data is kept in mind and the data is only accessible to licensed medical practitioners and patients themselves.
Impact
Instant access to critical patient information to medical staff, low cost, and yet the high impact on the way medical institutions operate. Streamlining the patient care practice for medical staff and saving around 250,000 lives annually by eliminating human error and ensuring patient safety. This app also obliterates the need to carry the medical files and other records in a hard copy format, by allowing people to keep track of all their medical history digitally, in one place. Our product is like the "Digilocker" for the healthcare sector.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges that we ran into was to design multiple complicated database schemas and ensure that all of them work together. Another challenge being associating patient specimens with patient id. We broke the tasks into small modules and worked one step at a time through it, eliminating multiple bugs.
What's next for medScan
scaling and A/B testing with a web app to register users followed by testing with hospital and beginning further development.
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