PATS: Platform for Patients Referral System

Inspiration

Consisting of four members from four different provinces, our team noticed the difficulties in Thailand’s patient referral system. With limited medical technology and healthcare staff, services provided by specialists are limited to be provided primarily in Regional Hospitals. The problem we found is that to refer patients out from community hospital to regional hospital, the communication process seems time-consuming, as it was held by direct-call, fax, and a lot of paperwork, which was considered outdated. Also, it always takes time to inquire information about referral destination availability. Thus, we decided to develop a more effective system to cope with this particular issue.

What it does

PATS is an interactive platform that deals with request sending between hospitals to refer patients in and out digitally and provides information of all possible referral destinations for community hospitals to reduce time spent on research. By generating patient-and-hospital suitable options & finding the optimal routes, PATS will be able to reduce time consumption and enhance chances to rescue patients in time. In the long run, PATS will help organize the system by collecting case history for data analysis in system management and strengthen the support and connection between hospitals.

How we built it

The creation of PATS involved the front-end development, for UI/UX and back-end, to process the input data. We utilized HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for website development. As our project needs to manipulate databases with the input, we choose Python as the primary back-end as it represents the best language to process data. We also implement Danfo.js to control and process structured data, such as a list of hospitals available.

Challenges we ran into

Given that none of us had substantial web programming expertise, several of the tools we used in this project were our first time utilizing them. Consequently, we had to overcome a number of obstacles to bring our product to where it is now. But as we steadily learned the technical process, we managed to launch the platform.

Another issue is that since our problem space was situated in the scenario of medical working space, our primary challenges were obtaining several sources of patients' referral workflow to put ourselves into personnels’ shoes and be able to identify the problem they are facing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of integrating data analytics and interactive user interface into our final product. This project pushes us to research beyond normal parameters — instead of only learning technical skills and academic lessons, we learned workflow and organization of healthcare structure in Thailand, which inspired us to solve more healthcare system problems in the near future.

What we learned

From the technical perspective, we learned a great deal about web development on both front-end and back-end, including many tools we had never heard of, such as Danfo.js.

But more importantly, we learned a great deal about the medical field, particularly regarding patient referral systems and how “centralized” the medical system in Thailand was. We also learned the work culture of personnel involved in the process and could spot the problem within.

What's next for PATS: Platform for Patients Referral System

The next step of PATS is to make it practical for the real world.

We planned to link PATS with real-time data from Google Maps in an optimal route feature to deal with factors involved in real situations, including traffic congestion. We also aimed to add “specific case category” and “telemedicine function for no-risk cases” in our referral system in order to reduce emergency department workload.

For other applications, we hope that the “PATS” platform can also be utilized to tackle other health issues. For instance, it could be used for Covid-19 patients transferring, blood bank link, and organ transplantation network.