PatientSide

Inspiration

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we've had to let go of many of the things we had been accustomed to, from movies to restaurants and much more. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of the shift in focus to the pandemic has resulted in letting go of a crucial aspect of people's medical lives: other ailments not necessarily linked to COVID-19. From hearing countless stories of missed cancer screenings, rises in cardiac arrests, and much more, we decided we wanted to develop a tool to encourage people to seek treatment and guidance for their ailments, regardless of their relation to the ongoing pandemic.

What it does

PatientSide is a screening service that is triggered via voice command from a platform such as Google Assistant or Siri. Upon initiating the service, it will engage in conversation with the user to triage them based on the severity of their symptoms. Starting with a basic COVID-19 screening, it then triages the reported symptoms and assigns a priority based on their inherent severity and potential diagnoses. Depending on the severity, the patient may be prompted to seek further treatment at a later time or immediately. Regardless of outcome, a transcript of the conversation is then sent to the patient's primary care physician for further records, which the provider can view from a provider-facing app platform.

This service helps promote the disclosure of non-pandemic illness symptoms. It also helps promote social distancing by staggering hospital and clinic visits to avoid crowding patient wait rooms.

How we built it

We used Flutter for creating the interface that the clinicians would access and Google Firebase/Firestore for the setting up the backend in terms of storing JSON formatted user/patient historical interactions with Google Assistant. We also used Google Conversations Action Console to set up the test conversation structure with Google Assistant.

Challenges we ran into

None of our team members had prior experience with the Google Cloud platform, but thankfully the workshops this year along with mentorship were a terrific aid in our development experience.

What's next for PatientSide

We hope that PatientSide can partner with various healthcare systems to refine our decision algorithm for our screening tool and provide real-time occupancy and foot-traffic information to further dilute waiting periods and promote social distancing. We believe that PatientSide can be the next step forward in promoting holistic care during a global pandemic so that no patient is left behind.