Safe Vitals

Estimated Urgent Care Wait Times, Encrypted Sharing of Medical Records (if you change doctors), Secure Communication

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Inspiration

We tried to solve two major issues in the healthcare industry:

  1. Estimated Emergency Waiting Times: After a 911 call, paramedics in an ambulance make calls to the nearest hospitals in order to inquire what the estimated wait times are. We used an API by Density (http://density.io) and created a web-app that automates the wait times by automatically scanning the number of people waiting at each hospital.

  2. Communication: Have you ever had to change doctors? Maybe because you moved to another city, or just wanted to get a second opinion? It can be a struggle to shift all your medical records (securely); Safe Vitals tries to solve that problem by consolidating all your medical records in one place (which you can access anytime) and share with any doctors with a single click. It offers means of safe communication and messaging with your healthcare providers (an example for this would be secure messaging with your psychiatrist).

How we built it

We used the density API and simulated hospitals, which scan the number of people and estimates the wait time depending on the past-average times. We used Sketch for the WebApp UI and imported Android/iOS assets from there that point onwards; we went ahead and continued with our developed in Android Studio (in Java). The back-end uses NodeJs to communicate with the WebApp; it also live-updates the wait-times at each hospital (by making HTTP GET calls to the Density API and our simulated hospital environments). As for the sharing medical records and communication we used blowfish cipher for encryption (in existence since 1993 and not cracked till date - it is what is considered military grade encryption by various companies). The user authentication is handled on Firebase (by Google) and we store user info (not medical records) on our AWS server in a MongoDB database.

Challenges we ran into

We had some initial issues trying to get the NodeJs part of our server to interact with the API and GET requests. We were at first using the NPM library 'request' but could not figure out how to include an authentication token in the header; we solved this by writing our own node script which uses HTTP GET to interact with the API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We've created a product which is easily useable by a broad audience, regardless of tech-savviness, and is useful for individuals with large amounts of medical data that needs to be consistently maintained, such as someone with a chronic condition, but also for individuals who have relatively little data but still desire a unified and secure location for it.
The wait-time calculator for urgent care solves an issue that is problematic for both health providers and patients, especially in big cities.

What's next for Safe Vitals

We are planning to setup online consultations (and healthcare) services for appropriate healthcare services

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