Triage

What it does

TRIAGE is a live matching and routing engine for campus mental health support. Students check in via short text or voice note; an embedding-based classifier scores urgency and topic, then routes them to a peer supporter, counselor queue, or immediate crisis escalation — replacing multi-week wait times with a response in minutes.

How we built it

This is a Round 1 idea submission, so the focus so far has been architecture and safety design rather than a working build. The plan: FastAPI for identity verification and check-in intake, a sentence-embedding model scoring urgency + topic against a counselor-labeled reference set, Celery-based threshold routing (0–3 peer supporter, 4–7 counselor queue, 8–10 crisis protocol), and WebSockets for real-time chat.

Challenges we ran into

The core design challenge was avoiding a naive "AI therapist" pitch — automation can triage and route, but it can never be the last line of defense in a crisis. That shaped the human-in-the-loop escalation protocol: any score of 8+ triggers a mandatory on-call counselor response, never a fully automated action.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Designing a routing architecture that's genuinely differentiated from the static chatbots most campus mental health tools ship — TRIAGE is a live matching engine, not a Q&A bot — while keeping the MVP scope realistic enough to build within a hackathon timeframe.

What we learned

Nearly 70% of college students report a mental health concern within the past year, yet most campus centers have no acuity-based routing — a student in crisis and a student with mild stress land in the same queue. That gap, more than any technical challenge, is what the project is built around.

What's next for TRIAGE

If shortlisted, build the MVP: check-in, classifier, and routing live end-to-end, piloted with a campus health office as a formal partner. Longer-term, extend the same triage engine to physical-symptom intake and clinic queueing.

Built With

• celery
• fastapi
• postgresql
• python
• react
• redis
• sentence-embedding
• websockets
• whisper