NurseNav

Inspiration

The inspiration for this story starts when a friend of mine who had gotten injured and we had to go to the hospital. It was in the middle of the night and we barely even managed to get a ride there. When we were arrived, the hospital said there was no guarantee if the insurance would even accept a co pay since they don't accept insurance co pay requests on certain days. Luckily my friend didn't have to worry about the price, but you could only imagine the situation for those who are not as well off or not as physically able as us (college students). Not only would that have to some how find a way to take themselves to the hospital, but they have to worry about the costs, the treatments to get, and a million other things. Medical care should be more accessible to everyone and should be transparent up front about their rate to reduce people's anxiety in an already challenge filled world.

What it does

We built NurseNav which is a mobile app aimed at finding caretakers available to people's needs. The user select the needs that they require and will be given caretakers based on your proximity to you and their expertise in your medical requirements. You will be able to use that to contact the caretaker to schedule a time for them to take care of your need. This is not intended for any sort of intensive procedure. Cases that these are intended for are for when there are cases where a person has specific medical needs and the person who takes care of them have to step out for a period of time. It is hard if not impossible to get a specialized caretaker quickly and skilled enough to serve the physical in-abled.

How we built it

We built this application using python flask, MongoDB atlas, Flask login, PyMongo, map box, JavaScript, fletch, HTML, and CSS. We split our team into a backend pair and a front end pair in order to properly delegate tasks in order to finish them efficiently. The backend pair dealt with the flask server, setting up MongoDB for both users and caretakers, setting up functional calls so we can access database properly, and designing proper queries to output data to display for the front end pair. The backend pair also had to create their own implementation of authentication using hashing for each of the user accounts and as well as the nurse account. The front end pair worked on all of the UI/UX elements of the project by using JavasScript, fletch API, HTML, CSS, and using the map box API in order to create a proper map to display the user's current location and the reported locations of caretakers. We made our application fit the mobile format by making it a web app. This allows it to be opened as an app on mobile or opened via web browser on any platform. We used coordinates of caretakers and the user's current location to calculate the distance between the user and each caretaker in order to give optimal search results to find care takers.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many problems as many of our team members weren't familiar with the technologies that we used. We had a lot of issues with using JavaScript's fetch API since we used a different format of make it a web app for mobile. This lead to many issues and many hours of debugging. We also had a tough time making the UI flexible to fit with many different platforms such as Mobile, PC, etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of making an application that is cross platform.

What we learned

We all learned a lot more about development and also problems that people deal with in order to get accessibility.

What's next for NurseNav

Implementing better map support and database optimizations in order to support national use. We would also need to get nurses and caretakers to sign up to do these services. We also need to build up a method to verify nurses since as of right now, we would have to manually verify the nurses since we value the security of our users.