My Rx

Inspiration

Every year, millions of American elderlies suffer from the harmful effects of polypharmacy. This is a critical healthcare issue that has reached epidemic levels within the United States. Not only does it add onto the disease burden and increase elderly morbidity and mortality rates, it also raises healthcare costs and takes up significant medical resources. To give some perspective, American elderlies (age 65 and older) have been hospitalized approximately 35 million times for adverse drug events, and more than 150,000 have died prematurely and unexpectedly within a year from contraindication due to polypharmacy. There is also an associated annual healthcare cost of billions of dollars on polypharmacy. Unfortunately, these statistics will only continue to rise as the number of American elderlies is estimated to double over the next four decades.

What it does

My Rx is an app that not only helps the elderly population check for contraindications, but also share these records with their physicians and specialists so all parties can have a complete view of the user's medication status.

How we built it

We built our project using React and ASP.NET and hosted our application, api, and database on Azure. We also created continuous integration and deployment pipelines to automate the deployments of our application from code change to production.

To get the drug interaction data, we used free use drug APIs provided by RxNav.

cicd

Challenges we ran into

Creating a simple, user-friendly interface focusing on the elderly population while also including all necessary medical information has been challenging, since we have neither the elderly perspective nor a complete understanding of their preferences and needs when it comes to a medicine-focused app. Additionally given the time constraints, we could not interview potential users and collect data to help with our app development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The team consists of only two members with very different professions (software engineering and public health/healthcare). We are proud to combine our professional insights into solving a pressing problem. It has been a challenging yet rewarding experience working together.

What we learned

One important lesson we learned is that the advancement of technology, healthcare, and medicine go hand-in-hand. As a team consisting of only a software engineer and an aspiring health professional, we realized that our knowledge in our separate professions is not enough to make significant contributions to real life issues, which oftentimes require insights across numerous disciplines. Instead, we must join our knowledge and work together to make meaningful changes and interventions.

What's next for My Rx

The next step of our app development is to enhance user experience with new features:

Personalized platform

The app will automatically generate a personalized platform based on each user’s registered medications and conditions. This platform will include online communities, discussion boards, relevant articles, and resources. This multi-purpose support system will enhance accessibility and experience by connecting users undergoing similar experiences.

Computer vision Rx detection

The prescription labels on medication containers are oftentimes too small to see, making it difficult for the users to read clearly and input onto the app. To solve this problem, we will employ computer vision for prescription detection. The app will read the prescription label from images and auto-complete the medication list for the users, making the process much more efficient.

Languages

We will also expand our target users to non-/ non-native English speakers by including other most-spoken languages in the United States. Some of the first additional languages we aim to incorporate are Spanish, Chinese/Mandarin, Tagalog, French, and Vietnamese.