QuickCare4U

Inspiration

A few years ago my friend's dad was taken to the ER because of a random muscle spasm with his eye. He had double vision and this was normally a sign of a stroke. Having to wait in a hospital for over 4 hours with no indication as to when her dad was going to be treated and not knowing what was actually going on with him was extremely frustrating for my family. This is just one example of the struggles experienced by many Canadian patients daily.

What it does

We created a website to tackle the issue of emergency room wait times in Canadian hospitals. Our website, QuickCare4U allows patients needing to go to an emergency room to locate a hospital near them with the shortest wait time and the most hospital bed availability. The website also allows patients to know an approximate time to when they will be treated.

How we built it

The website was built using Wix, a popular business website development platform which gave us access to professional design elements and components. In order to connect our hospital locations database to the search engine, we coded in JavaScript. This allowed us to filter the hospital searches based on what each hospital was qualified to do. For example, certain hospitals specialize in heart surgeries, so, any heart related emergencies would be directed there through our website.

Challenges we ran into

A challenge we faced was how to offer more than our competitors. Ontario already launched a health wait times website in 2017. This website includes wait times between referrals to getting to see a specialist. To improve this idea we based our website on wait times in Ontario ER’s. This was not included in Ontario’s site which allowed us to stand out from the competition. Another app called Doctr was launched 12+ years ago and is #115 for medical apps in the app store. This app has been getting negative reviews as customers were not receiving the premium features they paid for. QuickCare4U has an advantage as this is a website with all features available to patients free of cost. Another challenge we faced was the time constraint. Using JavaScript to further amplify the search engine and filter based on the wards and capabilities of the hospital was a bit of a challenge due to the time constraint and unfortunately this feature still has some bugs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the Wix development platform allowed us to master an elegant and clean interface. An easy-to-use interface is of utmost importance to a patient who wishes to access our website in a time of urgency. Not only are we proud of the design and features of our website but also what we were able to learn about other Canadian patients to whom this website could be of use.

What we learned

Throughout this process we learned about the extremely long wait times affecting patients in Canada. These wait times have even resulted in multiple deaths through the years. In fact, between the years 1993 and 2009, wait times in Canada have resulted in around 44,273 deaths. Also the average wait times in Canadian ER’s are around 4 hours per patient. In the website making process we learned how to create a well organised site. We learned about the features that Wix provides and how to make our website as efficient as possible.

What's next for QuickCare4U

Our goal with QuickCare4U is to get hospital’s on board with our idea. To maximize the benefits of our website we need Hospital secretaries to use our sign in feature. This would continue to update availability as well as wait times. Finally once achieving this, we want to continue to grow across Ontario and then Canada. Wait times in ERs are not only a concern in Ontario but all across the country!