QRoupon

QRoupon is a Quick Base app that allows patients to get free diagnosis via an eCoupon system managed by the participating healthcare professionals in partnership with other healthcare providers.

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Quick Base Virtual Hackathon

QRoupon

Inspiration

We wanted to provide a solution to facilitate early cancer diagnosis among low-income patients in developing nations (like Malaysia). As WHO states in its "Guide to cancer early diagnosis",

30-50% of cancers could be prevented with early diagnosis resulting in better treatment outcomes for the patients in terms of life expectancy and survival rates.

WHO indicated in the guide,

one of the barriers to early diagnosis being "inaccessible diagnostic testing, pathology and staging",

which mainly speaks about the underprivileged patients with lower-income households. The financial distress for this particular group of patients can be as simple as not having enough money to pay for transportations or parking fees while commuting to hospitals for treatment. Hence, the difficulties to afford timely diagnosis. The National Health Services, UK developed new strategies to achieve its ambitious 2028 goals to boost patient uptake in early cancer diagnosis. NHS believed that establishing cancer alliances and ramping up the rapid diagnostics centres will be the key elements in achieving the long term goals. In our beloved country, Malaysia, the National Cancer Society Malaysia has formed an alliance with insurers (ETIQA) and panel hospitals offering free mammogram screening for more than 6000 eligible patients yearly. We are inspired by these actions, that we challenged ourselves to build upon a similar approach, but for cancer early diagnosis instead of health screening. We realized that there isn't a platform yet that connects various stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem, to providing FREE cancer diagnosis as a facility or means of CSR initiatives by companies. While there are a vast amount of people needing financial support for early diagnosis, there are also an abundance of people wanting to voluntarily provide assistance, especially financially. Our aim is to connect them both via a digital platform in a win-win situation, and therefore we position ourselves around the theme of 'connection' and 'responsiveness'.

What it does

QRoupon makes full use of Quick Base native application features to allow digital interaction and partnership between a funder (drug manufacturer), healthcare professionals (doctors), healthcare providers (diagnostics labs) and patients. It starts with a funder (in our case is a drug manufacturer) registering their partners - healthcare professionals and diagnostics labs into the app, and inserting some drugs indications and products that the drug manufacturer and its competitors carry, into the 'Drugs Inventory'. The drugs inventory is used to calculate the 'match score' analysis for automated decisions to approve/reject the next FREE coupon request by the healthcare professional. It is designed in a way that would benefit the funder in a small variable percentage (20% or lesser), in return for the provision of free diagnosis for the targeted lower-income patients. The algorithm looks at the last 10 voucher requests by a particular healthcare professional, and calculates the percentage of the prescribed drugs in favour of the funder's product, taking into consideration only for indications or conditions where the drug manufacturer has a product to offer. We'd recommend drug manufacturers to keep the percentage as low as they can, with an optimal value of below 20%, to encourage cancer early diagnosis and benefit the patients more as part of the drug manufacturer's CSR initiative. In case of too low a match analysis score, the system will notify the drug manufacturer to make the final call whether to still grant free diagnosis coupons or not to the healthcare professional (for his/her patients' use). Other than the complex match score algorithms, QRoupon unique features include among others, the ability to auto-generate multiple coupons (QR codes), maximum 5 at a time in a single request and able to auto forward the FREE coupons to maximum 5 patients' email addresses in 1 shot. QRoupon operates in 100% digital format, no hard copies nor physical interaction required. Patients who received the eCoupon , can simply bring the electronic coupon with QR code embedded, to the lab, whereby a Lab Admin will then scan the QR code to proceed with claim submission right after completing the diagnostics procedure. In a highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, it's important to adhere to all the legal and compliance requirements, it is therefore the reason we implemented data masking for patient's email addresses and have stringent control around the access and visibility to protect patients' privacy. QRoupon also works on mobile, and we recommend users to use mobile whenever possible.

How we built it

We used mostly the Quick Base native features to alleviate some pain points with regards to automatic coupon creation. Firstly, the Google Charts API was used for QR code generation, combined with Quick Base automation feature to multiply the coupons per request. We used Quick Base encode features to protect patients' confidentiality and identity. There are also several applications of the 'magic buttons' adopted from the Quick Base exchange to achieve some of the assumed business objectives through Quick Base APIs. For the eCoupon recipients, we used HTML and javascript to visualize and transform the eCoupon into a proper format. We take this hackathon seriously, and we did start off with some design thinking processes like defining the 'how might we' problem statement, throwing out some bold ideas and then converging to a few that are more promising and pragmatic ones. We could even share all the materials that appear as an output of the discussions - jamboards, trellos, UAT issue log and tracker etc. It is as if we are delivering on a real project and remain optimistic with the outcome.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to perform a 'moving average' calculation using the QB native app but we did not have this, so we got to figure out another way to achieve the same thing. We tried to create a mechanism whereby when a person is viewing a row item in a QB table, he can save it as PDF and email it to somebody. This is not natively available, and our research revealed that it can be easily achieved by using QSP - JuicedTech's add-ons, namely the Exact Forms Plus and Quick Base Courier. The DocuSign integration is also required in order to sort of legalize the eCoupon that was generated in replacement of a healthcare professional's wet signature. The need to generate multiple coupons with a single request was solved by using Quick Base automation, while for hiding the patient's identification, we used Quick Base Encode function. We were able to map the location of hospitals / diagnostics labs using Quick Base map report, however we haven't been able to figure out how to do a text search on the map report (similar to finding 'hospitals near me' kind of feature). JuicedTechnologies is a paid service, and we also had trouble using some of the APIs (requires a little bit extra knowledge and skills).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We optimized for impact on users and tried to find a way that benefits all stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem equally. We think that QRoupon may not be the fanciest technology, but it's the most accessible for a large group of users and can quickly have a scalable impact. We are proud that with one such simple Quick Base app, we could solve multitude of real world health issues at our fingertips! The concept that we introduced in the QRoupon, allows low-income patients to have better access to timely diagnosis of their cancer symptoms, at a lower cost of transportation due to the fact that everything is online and can be done virtually. Patients can skip the long queue to get a free coupon for the diagnosis. By playing around with the coupon expiry date, we could induce and sort of force patients to take action (perform the diagnosis) earlier. Ultimately this can lead to a better treatment outcome as a result of the early diagnosis. The FREE coupon can lift up the financial burden and allows patients to have extra pocket money to fund for their treatment. It is the treatment that makes all the difference and patients must adhere till completion for the best outcome. Healthcare professionals will benefit from the partnership through the improved treatment adherence and increasing trust to the healthcare system. As we connect funders and noble donors from all over the globe, the connection creates a balance between the demand and supply for cancer early diagnosis. The match score analysis is a great instrument to incentivize large corporates for their CSR activities and any sample products they give out from the inventory to support the patients. Overall we believe that the value chain helps in building a more sustainable future of healthcare.

What we learned

The pandemic has taught us a lot about the importance of digital engagement, a new way of communicating and interacting with the healthcare professional. Hard copies can be a real bottleneck, and hence digital touchpoints are vital in the continuum of care in the healthcare industry as well as in ensuring uninterrupted supply of medicine for patients with critical illness. As a fairly new user of Quick Base (we had about couple of months experience with Quick Base), we can actually testify that this is by far, the most user-friendly of all, compared to the other 'low-code' platforms available on the market such as Nintex/K2, PEGA lite, and Oracle APEX. Quick Base has set a new standard, and it is truly a low-code platform for any citizen developers. When we worked on building the app, we tried to incorporate the element of diversity and inclusion. How can we make our app useful to even the people in rural areas, with poor or no internet connection? (hence the printable voucher option) It's also an eye-opening fact that while some middle-income people worry about how they can afford cancer treatments, the vast majority of low-income households are concerned on even non-health related expenses, such as how they can pay for the transport to and fro the hospitals, or settle the parking fees. It is evident that financial distress could happen when a patient has exhausted all his financial resources to treat the cancer, and there's nothing left for them to survive even for basic necessities. Quick Base as a workflow tool, offers extensive features and is versatile enough to solve nearly anything required for this project using its native features. We appreciated the Quick Base Exchange a lot, allowing us to quickly adopt very useful features such as the Magic Button. This creates a better user experience as we improve the user interface.

What's next for QRoupon

We are ready to bring QRoupon to the market, as a prototype to be validated by potential stakeholders. We plan to pitch the idea to some targeted healthcare professionals, and gather feedback from the business side before rolling out or conduct further testing. As this is fairly a new concept, we need to also align the legal and compliance aspect of it with relevant parties, in order not to cross any line in the highly regulated healthcare industry. As a short term plan, we will be glad to have this app put on the Quick Base Exchange, hoping that it could benefit and inspire others. In the organization that we are currently serving, we are part of an 'underground' movement, with the agenda of bringing the Quick Base onto the official global enterprise platform. The success of this QRoupon app can further support our stance and ease the process. We had an idea to integrate QRoupon with one of our existing online bidding app (also on Quick Base). The eBidding app can be the gateway or point of entry for the general public to contribute (in the form of crowdfunding) , instead of just relying on the usual large corporates CSR initiative. The eBidding can have a feature that enables people to sign up either as the funders, or as the patients intermediators (the receivers). At the end of the day, what we hope to achieve with this initiative is for a seamless connectivity and sustainable future of healthcare. Last but not least, we would like to sincerely express our gratitude to the entire Quick Base team for hosting this virtual hackathon, and preparing the avenue for us to contribute back to society.

staysafe

stayhealthy

staypositive

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Yours truly, Team HACK HOGAN

$ Zarul Mustafa
$ Hidayah Rosli
$ Hairie Izwan

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