Inspiration
Large hospitals in populated areas, such as Beijing, usually have crowded waiting rooms. One chef reason is that the hospitals will place a TV monitor to broadcast appointment information, such as "Patient No. 7 please come to the doctor's office; patient No. 8 please get ready." Patients need to cluster around the TV, so as to not miss their turn to see the doctor and need to wait in line again. Such a noisy, crowded waiting room has caused many problems, including an increased level of distress for both patients and doctors, an increased disease transmission risk, and more. We want to create something that can notify patients of the same information, but without constraining them in the waiting room.
What it does
We have built a patient notification system to notify patients that "it's your time to come back and see your doctor." When the patient has checked-in and collected his/her patient information (patient number, phone number, doctor's room number), the patient will enter such information to our Google form by scanning the QR code posted on the waiting room wall. Then, the patient can leave during the waiting time, no longer being constrained in the waiting room. When the doctor's ready to see this patient, he/she can click a button on our webpage, and the patient will get an automatically generated text message as a notice.
How we built it
Our python program has two main parts: retrieving information from the Google sheet generated by the Google form, and generating text messages to a certain patient through a texting website called Twilio.
Challenges we ran into
When starting the project our initial challenge was finding a person familiar with coding/computer languages. All three of us have very little to no experience with computer science. With that mind, it became a struggle even to do the simplest of tasks. Although we did not find someone fluent in computer science, by asking questions and getting a lot of help with google we persevered and we able to provide a rough sketch of what our product would look like.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud of our finished product. Although it is not in it’s ideal form. We were able to come as close as possible. We overcame our lack of expertise in computer science and were able to code in other languages. Coming to this Hackathon, none of us knew what to expect or what should we know prior hand. Now, on the last day, we leave knowing significantly more about computer science than we ever did. We’re proud not only with our end product but also performing such feat with our struggles in mind.
What we learned
Over the course of the weekend, we not only learned just enough CSS and HTML to fulfill the requirements of our project. We were also able to learn different applications of these computer languages, other softwares to use when creating such projects and how to improve our project on a larger scale.
What's next for Texting Patients
- Polishing our prototype. This include using a more efficient texting website other than Twilio, and
- Collaborating with a hospital to implement our system, and eventually incorporating our project into the hospital system.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.