Pharm2Table

Inspiration

Human-centered design is a new philosophical approach focused on closing the gap between user needs and the tools available. (Giacomin, 2014) Current scientific discovery is based on multidisciplinary perspectives that focus on the goal of generalizing knowledge beyond the limits of discovery. Decades ago, scientific discoveries were exploratory and theoretical, but after the limitless outreach brought by software applications and the internet our scientific endeavors should also focus on closing the gap from bench to bedside. Our current goal is to allow users the possibility of understanding and deciding the best scientific and clinical judgment for the multiple databases that currently display pharmacogenomic data. We believe in the future of healthcare data storytelling. As data scientists, designers and scientists our vision is to illuminate an enriched and time-effective experience for an ever-growing tool in medicine.

Giacomin, J. (2014). What Is Human Centred Design? In The Design Journal (Vol. 17, Issue 4, pp. 606–623). Informa UK Limited. https://doi.org/10.2752/175630614x14056185480186

What it does

Our Flask app accepts a JSON with patient genetic data and cross-references it against the CPIK and PharmaGKB databases to get the most up-to-date guidelines via their APIs. Then the guidelines are presented and the user can select which one to trust.

How we built it

Our app is built with Flask, Bootstrap5, and jinja templating. It is hosted on Heroku.

Challenges we ran into

It took a while to be able to process the data because the IDs were different between the two data sources. At first, we thought we had to convert from one ID type to the other but then we found out there were other columns in the data we could use as a lookup key. The time we spent processing data made it hard to finish the rest of our app in the way we would have ideally wanted. We integrated our multidisciplinary perspective to create a cognitive ergonomic experience However we had to cut a lot of UI features in order to have enough time to get a minimal working demo.

Curtis, B. (1988). Five Paradigms in the Psychology of Programming. In Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 87–105). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-444-70536-5.50009-9

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was our first in-person hackathon and we are so glad we were able to come out and participate. Our past hackathon experience has been mostly virtual so it was not as collaborative and easy to work with others. In this hackathon, we had a lot of chances to learn from and contribute to the idea flow of other teams. We are proud of our group problem-solving skills and ability to talk through complex data, translate it into digestible diagrams, and finally software.

What we learned

We learned firsthand the difficulty of trying to make data from different sources work together harmoniously. There were many different naming conventions and API differences in data that were already complex. Our biggest challenge was not thinking of a UX, but just getting the data from all of the sources into a format that worked together. We learned the importance of uncoupled design so we could plug in data to our front end no matter what the process was to get the data. This way we could parallelize the front end and back end workflows without waiting for the backend in order to test or move forward with the front end. Unfortunately, since we needed all of our team to brainstorm and think through the data in the early stages we did not get a very early start on our simultaneous backend/frontend development workflow.

What's next for Pharm2Table

We have so many ideas for a better and more efficient user experience that we did not have time to implement. We would love for returning users to be able to see a record of past reports they have pulled and refresh them at will. Upon refresh, any updated data would show as highlighted and the user would be prompted to again select their preference of recommendations. In addition, we would like the pdf report to be fully customizable so users can fit it to their exact needs. Storing patient data of course brings up many security and privacy concerns that we were not able to tackle within the timeframe of 36 hours, however, we did have some security-related ideas that we would love to implement.

Who are we?

We are the G. Gnomes team, comprised of students and professionals from diverse backgrounds including computational biology, software engineering, design, and healthcare research. We are passionate about innovating through human-centered design that simplifies data and technology into a narrative that can be easily understood without a scientific background.

Our team is unique because of how we tackle a problem through collaborative brainstorming we try to bridge the ideas into a simple story that we can all grasp. We believe that the future of biotechnology is diversifying digital literacy through user experience simplification

Software Developers

Clinical Impact & UI/UX feeback