SymptoKey

Inspiration

For too long online diagnostic tools have been the plague of providers. Patients, thinking they are armed with the latest greatest medical information, go to their doctors not for treatment, but for confirmation. Providers, now are suddenly forced to defend their medical decisions to patients. Information intended to enlighten, has begun to burden. It's time for change.

What it does

SymptoKey is an online prognostic quiz that allows a user to input symptoms and receive recommendations for next steps of care, ranging from simply applying topical OTC medication, or seeking emergency care. We do not attempt to diagnose a specific disease. Rather, we give advice that the user can take to feel better, or suggest seeking the advice of a professional as necessary. These algorithmic decisions aren't based on heresy - rather, they're based on in-hospital best practices, giving our customers the assurance that they're receiving the highest quality advice - no matter their situation.

How we built it

Our site is comprised of a series of HTML files supported by a Django framework. Due to time constraints and technical hurdles, we postponed full implementation of our Django backend to focus our efforts on developing our web pages. Currently, our site exists as a series of connected HTML pages that redirect to one another based off of the user's input. We plan to use Django in the future as an opportunity to create a more sophisticated platform.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into was the timeframe of the event and linking together the aspects of our program. Given that we only had 36 hours total to complete our project, not accounting for time spent sleeping or eating, there was very little time to investigate issues with our program that we didn't previously comprehend. As a result, we decided to focus on what could be accomplished in our short time frame - namely linking together our HTML files - while reserving the more complicated aspects of our program as an opportunity for future development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We build a simple and efficient web-based prognosis algorithm. We are also able to collect real time data from the consumer which will help us understand health issues in an epidemiology point of view.

What we learned

Designing a web-based prognosis platform is very challenging. To truly to be assistive to the consumer in the health care setting, our technology needs to prioritize knowledge over information, and actionable suggestions over arcane diagnoses.

What's next for SymptoKey

As we add more prognosis pathways, SymptoKey will push the boundary of data collection in regards to public health crises. Eventually, we will be able to track and predict outbreaks in real time, and use our highly detailed symptomatic data to provide the most accurate prognostic outcomes as well as health planning solutions.