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PillPal front page
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PillPal Dashboard
Inspiration
Trying of a healthcare problem that we could make a real difference on, we thought there must be some simple process that goes wrong a lot. Then we thought of medication, there's always errors with medication! The FDA receives more than 100,000 reports every year that are associated with medication errors (FDA, 2019). Patient's choosing and keeping up with their medications could definitely be streamlined to be a safer and more encouraging experience, which is why PillPal exists!
What it does
PillPal is focused towards patients who have to deal with several medications, always having to keep up with what meds they need to take in the morning, take to work, and ingest at night. PillPal tracks the medications you need to take and their respective dosages and schedules.
How we built it
To make PillPal accessible to everyone, we decided to put it on the web using GitHub. It runs with a vanilla web development front end, and a Python and SQL based back-end.
Challenges we ran into
Finding easily accessible data on a wide array of medications proved to be difficult. We wanted PillPal to be ready for use for anyone with any condition. Though it's limited in in knowledge about many types of medication, it is very customizable to accommodate for the many different ailments people may have.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
This was definitely our least stressful hackathon, still stressful, but we at least managed to make something that looked half decent! It's far from complete, and there is much more potential ideas that could be brought into PillPal, but we're satisfied with it how it is.
What we learned
We tried to be very ambitious with this project, and learned a completely new tool in the process, Flask. Flask (a Python web framework) made it simple for our SQL server and our HTML to talk to one another, which was such a convenience for us.
What's next for PillPal
There were multiple ideas we came up with in the process that we couldn't feasibly reach, but they were interesting! We wanted PillPal to be able to produce easily digestible information on different medicines, but there was no simple solution to that problem without a good database of information. We also wanted PillPal to be able to detect conflicts in combining different medicines, but this idea was even more unfeasible for the same reason. Overall, PillPal could still make a great show for elderly folks who need someone to check up on their medicinal habits.
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