Pregnancy Care

Virtual Consultation and treatment in this Pandemic situation

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Inspiration

The CDC estimates that more than 650 mothers in the U.S. die each year during pregnancy, childbirth, or one year after pregnancy, with leading causes being cardiovascular disease, hemorrhage, and infection. There are significant disparities, with Black mothers having a maternal mortality rate (37.1 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies) that is 2.5 times the ratio for white mothers (14.7) and three times the ratio for Hispanic mothers (11.8). Unfortunately, research estimates that approximately half of these maternal deaths are preventable.

While I am researching about maternal care I came through (NFP program) where I inspired by the Nurse Family Partnership (“NFP”), a nurse home visitation program in the U.S. for new mothers. NFP provides home nurse visits to pregnant mothers who primarily are low-income, unmarried, and/or teenagers. NFP educates young mothers in positive health practices, responsible childcare, and economic self-sufficiency and personal development. Long-term follow up has shown that NFP’s work is likely to reduce maternal mortality by a factor of 3.5 times. More broadly, NFP’s work has been validated by four randomized controlled trials in New York, Tennessee, Colorado, and the Netherlands (the last study being based on a Dutch program similar to NFP). These studies demonstrated sizable and sustained positive effects, including reductions in child abuse/neglect and improvement in cognitive outcomes for children of mothers with low mental health or self-confidence.

(References: https://www.nursefamilypartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/NFP-Maternal-and-Child-Health-Outcomes.pdf https://evidencebasedprograms.org/document/nurse-family-partnership-nfp-evidence-summary/ https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-brief-report/2020/dec/maternal-mortality-united-states-primer )

What it does

Pregnancy care is a user-friendly virtual platform for volunteer nurses to connect, chat, have video calls with low income, young, and/or single pregnant mothers.

How I built it

I used Django, Python, Bootstrap and materializecss to build and style different components of our web application such as dashboard, Resources, and VideoChat. I used firebase for authentication and storing users' information rendered in different components. i used webRTC and socketIO to implement video calls.

Challenges I ran into

Some of the challenges I ran into are connecting a videocall and structuring different pages and connecting different components in my website. The backend server was also causing some issues in the very last minute, but I was able to resolve them. Since this was my first complete project using Django, I had to learn how to use Django static files. I also had trouble making the information appear as dynamic, but was able to seek help and accomplish that.

Accomplishments that I proud of

I'm proud of being able to create a DjangoApp and learning to create dynamic components. Coming into this project, Since I worked solo I didn't expect that I will cover this much of the project. However, I am proud of my final (functional!!) product.

What I learned

This was my first deep dive into Djangoand I learned more about components and working with a database. This is also my first web app in Django were I deployed in Github. And learned about webrtc and socket io.

What's next for Pregnancy Care

Add functionality to Registration. Add functionality so that the Patient can leave a Note before the Appt. (Leaving Goals during Appt works!) Add additional styling for the chat/video room page. Add heuristics for connecting patients with nurses. Build a mobile app?

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