Trial

Improve COVID-19 survival rate/outcomes with continuous microtrials

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Inspiration

Recently WHO started a worldwide trial for 4 potential COVID-19 treatments. That required a lot of coordination, took quite a bit to set up, and the results will take a lot of time to be aggregated and analyzed.

Trial was built to simplify the whole process. Once a potential candidate drug is approved for testing, doctors using Trial will get instructions to try it out with new patients (of course, with their consent). Any reported result immediately affects decision making.

What it does

  1. When a new patient arrives, Trial assigns him one or two potential treatments
  2. Doctor ensures treatments are compatible (e.g. patient has no contraindications), and starts treating the patient
  3. At the end, doctor reports treatment result

The secret sauce is that results reported in step 3 immediately affect what treatments are offered in step 1 for new patients. The drugs, that had better outcomes in the past will be offered more often, than the drugs that had not, increasing the survival rate at the same time as collecting important information for research.

How I built it

I actually started working on the project before the hackathon was announced. It took a few days to remember how to do web programming (I am mostly a machine learning engineer now).

Challenges I ran into

  1. Privacy regulations - patient privacy is hard, and Trial strives for the best.
  2. The project has a lot of potential features, that are still to be added. But during the epidemic, time is more valuable than gold. I had to figure out what parts of the project were absolutely essential, and which should be delayed to after release (possibly indefinitely), so that the project could be released quickly and have an immediate impact. Cutting features had to be balanced with usability, as bad usability could lead to poor adoption, significantly reducing the overall usefulness.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Mostly cutting corners at the right places.

What's next for Trial

I am preparing "Home Trial": version of Trial for people diagnosed with COVID-19 and staying at home. It would let people at home try various 100% harmless remedies, including vitamin boosters, diets, etc. "Home Trial" will take care of cataloging results of these home experiments, and sharing it with other users.

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