UniMed - United Medicine

Introducing the newest kind of CMS - a CARE management system.

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Inspiration

So, like every Hackathon we’ve done in the past, we wanted to build a solution based on the pain points of actual, everyday people. So when we decided to pursue the Healthtech track, we called the nurses and healthcare professionals in our lives. To our surprise, they all seemed to have the same gripe – that there was no centralized system for overviewing the procedures, files, and information about specific patients in a hospital or medical practice setting. Even a quick look through google showed that there wasn’t any new technology that was really addressing this particular issue. So, we created UniMed - united medical - to offer an innovate alternative to the outdated software that exists – or for some practices, pen and paper.

While this isn’t necessarily the sexiest idea, it’s probably one of the most important issues to address for healthcare professionals. Looking over the challenge criteria, we couldn’t come up with a more fitting solution – what comes to mind immediately is the criterion about increasing practitioner efficiency. The ability to have a true CMS – not client management software, but CARE management software – eliminates any need for annoying patients with a barrage of questions they’ve answered a hundred times, and allows nurses and doctors to leave observations and notes in a system where they can be viewed from other care workers going forward.

What it does

From a technical, data-flow perspective, this is the gist of how UniMed works: Solace connects our React-based front end to our database. While we normally would have a built a SQL database or perhaps gone the noSQL route and leveraged mongoDB, due to time constraints we’re using JSON for simplicities sake. So while JSON is acting, typically, like a REST API, we’re pulling real-time data with Solace’s functionality. Any time an event-based subscription is called – for example, a nurse updates a patient’s records reporting that their post-op check-up went well and they should continue on their current dosage of medication – that value, in this case a comment value, is passed to that event (updating our React app by populating the comments section of a patient’s record with a new comment).

How we built it

We all learned a lot at this hackathon – Jackson had some Python experience but learned some HTML5 to design the basic template of our log-in page. I had never used React before, but spent several hours watching youtube videos (the React workshop was also very helpful!) and Manny mentored me through some of the React app creation. Augustine is a marketing student but it turns out he has a really good eye for design, and he was super helpful in mockups and wireframes!

What's next for UniMed

There are plenty of cool ideas we have for integrating new features - the ability to give patients a smartwatch that monitors their vital signs and pushes that bio-information to their patient "card" in real time would be super cool. It would be great to also integrate scheduling functionality so that practitioners can use our program as the ONLY program they need while they're at work - a complete hub for all of their information and duties!

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