StreamMD

Appointment Scheduling
Patient Signup
Test results
Labs and Doctor's Note

Here's the whole story Be sure to write what inspired you, what you learned, how you built, and challenges you faced.

Inspiration

What it does

What I learned

What's next for StreamMD

When the Covid-19 pandemic landed here in California in mid-March, I was building a concierge telemedicine platform called Opt Health focused on addressing and optimizing men’s health issues through proactive and preventive medicine protocols, including hormone therapy and sexual health. We were getting close to launch but decided to put Opt Health on hold because the onboarding process requires an in-person visit between our licensed practitioners and our clients and we felt it both tone deaf and logistically challenging to launch during these times

The same week, a physician friend of mine in San Diego that knew about Opt Health called to inquire whether it might be possible to use our platform to see patients, at a social distance. Like many physicians and other healthcare workers, he was very concerned about his own, and his staff’s, direct exposure to patients that may have an active Covid-19 infection. Within days, several of his physician friends and colleagues also wanted to use our platform for the same reason.

We saw a massive opportunity, not only from a business perspective to repurpose portions of our technology to create a new product line, but more importantly, to meaningfully contribute to the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic. We decided to build a Covid-19 telemedicine solution called StreamMD that allows licensed physicians to screen, treat, and test (we have access to FDA EUA home-collection test kids) patients while minimizing community spread, mitigating person-to-person infection, and reducing unnecessary and inefficient overflow of patients in emergency departments at hospitals.

In addition to StreamMD facilitating live medical consultations while keeping doctors and patients safe, StreamMD is contributing to the reemergence of cautious commerce by partnering with leaders in certain sectors and industries that have essential and non-essential employees that require a screening, Covid-19 test, or return-to-work letters in order to safely perform their job functions. We believe that when and as society is prepared to re-open and slowly return to business as usual, it should occur in the most prudent way possible.

We wanted to make a difference and help during these unprecedented times, and we believe that StreamMD is an invaluable tool that both businesses and consumers can utilize to stay safe, healthy, and productive.

During this journey, I learned many things. I learned that our doctors, as one of the primary user groups, could be and were tremendously helpful in designing certain portions of our product. In fact, Opt Health’s chief medical officer, Dr. John Tidwell, has an engineering degree, which proved extremely useful in creating a doctor UX for scheduling using DrChrono, consultation, and post-consult note that is clean, smooth and seamless. To wit, any physician can be trained to successfully use our platform in less than ten minutes. Currently, StreamMD has eight physicians on board and can scale quickly and nimbly. I also learned that Covid-19 disproportionately impacts African American and LatinX populations, and in response we are actively developing partnerships to make our services available to impacted communities.

Finally, I learned first-hand about the power and ability of a group of dedicated people to rise and meet challenges in the face of fear, uncertainty, and chaos. Many people during the last couple of months were frozen, unproductive, or worse; however, our team was able to build something from scratch that has the potential to save lives. That is very real, and I am proud of that accomplishment above all else.

The future of StreamMD is promising, and exciting. We are presently: exploring new business opportunities and partnerships to get StreamMD in front of the right people in the right sectors to get people back to work; deploying the service to disproportionately-impacted populations; and continuing to test and improve the platform with ongoing feedback from patients and physicians.

How I built it

Using APIs we combined Dr. Chrono, OpenTok and Square Payments to create a HIPAA compliant telemedicine solution!

Challenges I ran into

Before saving the final clinical note, we needed to store and retrieve the patient intake data in a HIPAA compliant manner before saving the final note in discrete templates. We ended up using a “hidden” form field on Dr. Chrono Clinical Note Template to store patient data as json.

Engineering Accomplishment that I'm proud of

Distributive Appointment Reassignment Solution. When a physician has to cancel, we seamlessly reassign the appointment to another available physician with the least amount of appointments.

2 Video Demos

In this demo, the patient registers as a StreamMD user and schedules and pays for an appointment. The patient’s health data and appointment is stored in Dr. Chrono and the payment is handled through Square Developer API. After the patient meets with their physician, they are redirected to purchase a COVID-19 test. This payment also uses Square Developer API.

In this demo, the physician logs in to join an appointment with a patient. The clinical note is pulled from the Dr. Chrono API and can be reviewed before and during the call. Afterwards, the physician edits and saves the notes back into Dr. Chrono.