Summary
A mobile healthcare app that lets patients carry and organize their own records without rely on a cumbersome external database. By giving patients ownership of their data, we reduce hospital inefficiency, improve patient outcomes, and help create more informed patients.
Who we are:
Jeremiah Milbauer — Computer Science and Philosophy Undergrad at The University of Chicago Osama El-Sayed — MD/PhD student at the university of Illinois at Chicago COM Hannah Pennington —MD/PhD student at the university of Illinois at Chicago COM Navin Weiss — Software Engineering Undergrad at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Inspiration
One of our group members had a difficult experience while hospitalized in the last year. Although the hospital used a centralized database, he had to repeat his entire medical history every time he met a new care team. Aside from being frustrating to remember all that information, it can be emotionally taxing to feel like the central coordinator for your care. We wanted to create a platform that makes this experience less stressful for patients, and streamlined for physicians.
Other Advantages
Relying on patients to recall their medical histories introduces inefficiencies into the healthcare system. It can waste the patients’ time, and the doctors’ time: time that is both expensive and all-important for offering quality care.
Not every patient has access to information and resources to learn about their healthcare. By creating a platform that allows patients to better understand and manage their healthcare situation, we can give more and more people access to information that can improve their quality of life and quality of care.
This platform also helps patients transfer information between physicians that use different database systems, allowing for greater continuity of care.
This platform also offers distinct advantages to low-income users. This segment of the population often uses the emergency room as primary care. Studies have shown that increasing continuity of care for these patients leads to significantly better outcomes. Additionally, low-income patients often have the most complex complications accompanying their disease, and keeping track of these additional complications and symptoms offers a distinct advantage.
How we built it!
We built an iOS app using Swift in Xcode. None of us had built for iOS before — so this was an exciting experience!
From the user’s perspective, the app is fairly simple. Users are greeted with a log-in page, where they can either enter the profile of an existing user, create a new user, or enter as a physician. When creating a new user profile, patients enter a simple baseline of information and medical history, similar to what they would enter when first registering at a new hospital. Once a user navigates to their profile, they have four categories of information: “Personal History”, “Medications”, “General Info”, “Notifications”. These categories were chosen for the specific advantages they offer both patients and physicians in understanding the medical records.
Under the hood, we use a data structure system that stores patients as structs and associates a huge amount of information on visits, diagnoses, physicians seen, procedures undergone, medications administered, etc. This information is not always displayed to the patient — that would be overwhelming — but is always there so that a physician can see the gritty details of the patient’s medical history.
Marketability
This app would primarily be marketed towards hospitals and insurance providers. Hospitals would be benefited from increased efficiency of care, and insurance providers are benefited by improved outcomes and logistic streamlining. Of course patients would be benefited as well, but the goal of the app would be to offer the basic functionality to every user without cost.
Going Forward
Security & HIPAA We would love to improve the security of our platform, but that was not a priority in this time-crunch weekend. With regards to HIPAA, the platform as it stands never takes information out of the patients hands — so it’s not a major concern. Physician Verification Although it is important to give patients access and ownership of their medical records, we don’t want patients to be able to abuse this. Each visit and diagnosis on the platform is associated with a physician, so future healthcare providers can confirm diagnosis and past treatment with the original physician. We’re really excited about exploring other was to handle this verification Information Sharing It would be nice if patients could actually share their app-data with their doctors. Doing this, however, introduces a slew of HIPAA concerns. It’s definitely a technical challenge we’re eager to approach — and we’ve started laying the foundations of the physician-side of the app, which could be used for managing a variety of patient records.
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