MedicareBot. Bringing pediatric care to your phone.

Inspiration

COVID 19 has turned the lives of millions of people upside down. Leaving many of us not only worrying about our safety but most especially the safety of our elders, our parents and grandparents. As a Spaniard with both parents being doctors and close to retirement, the situation is hitting very close to home. I cannot help but worry for them, but at the same time feel proud at what extents they are willing to go to safeguard the health of those around them.

My father a paediatrician at a public hospital in northern Spain has started to pass most of his consultations through video calls in Whatsapp, in an attempt to lower the risk of contagion for his patients and the hospital staff. Most of his patients have happily taken to this new service as it's not only safer but it's convenient. Seeing him do this, left me to ponder how could I improve his and his patients' experience. After some thinking, I came up with the following idea.

What I have in mind

We want to build an online consultation app that uses a chatbot to conduct an intake interview and triaging patients, in order to reduce the workload on doctors and provide a better experience for patients. The full-fledged app will be end to end: Intake interview, triaged ticketing system, video and chat consultation, online prescription, and online follow up. Given the limited time of this hackathon, I want to limit the MVP to a chatbot that conducts an intake interview, triages patients and schedules the online consultation. Remaining features to be deployed is dependent on time availability.

I want to focus this app for pediatric and geriatric care. I believe both ends of the pyramid population are the most affected by the current situation, given that they are the ones that tend to require the most immediate medical attention.

An interactive chatbot is a great tool to conduct an intake interview. Not only patients can input their symptoms into the chatbot, but the chatbot can ask pertinent questions that will vary based on the inputted symptoms, in order to gather all the pertinent information. All the gathered information will be delivered to the doctor before he starts the online consultation, saving time for both the patient and the doctor.

As well we can use this information to triage patients, in other words deciding which patients to treat first. By using an algorithm to examine the answers to the chatbot we can automatically flag which patients might require the most urgent care. Classifying patients by severity will allow this bot to as well act as an agenda. Assigning an estimated time for each online consultation, providing more clarity to patients and doctors.