HealthSurge

Bringing medical equipment and specialists where is needed - HealthSurge is enabling health providers to reach medical equipment owners and specialists from the palm of their hand.

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Inspiration

In the media, we have been hearing that there is a shortage of ventilators and trained professionals. Research centers, innovative people, and companies are starting to produce or lend out ventilators. There isn't a good way of linking the equipment owners and producers, specialists in operating the equipment, and the health care providers.

Background

New producers and suppliers find themselves in difficulty when reaching to hospitals or hospital groups, which have their supplier networks well established. Some health care providers are suffering from shortages of equipment and/ or trained specialists. Some health care providers are underutilizing their equipment inventory and human resources. There are nurses and medical professionals who are retired, between jobs or retrained in another profession who know about operating a specific type of equipment. They would like to contribute and help train medical staff online via video conferencing or even put one more time the medical uniform to make a difference.

It's time for collaboration, and we believe that crises bring the best in people!

Problem

Scarcity and fluctuation of medical equipment and skilled professionals is costing health and treatment providers time, effort, and financial resources; these have become acute in Covid-19 times.

Mission

We're bringing medical equipment and specialists where are most needed, and developing synergies at European level.

What it does

The platform connects health care providers in need of medical equipment and specialists with the resource supply holders. The equipment procurement responsible would log in and use the search functionality to look for the needed ventilator, the specialist who can operate the ventilator, or both by typing in the ventilator name and model and filtering by rent or buy, and if training is needed or not, and distance. Pressing enter would result in a listing of all the available offers depending on the used criteria. The function shows the closest options first, and the closest equipment names or skills.

When the user finds the offer that best satisfies his/her request, her/she can use the chat function to reach the offer owner. The chat function has some pre-built questions to guide the user, and reduce the time spent for sealing the deal.

If the user considers that the listing showed doesn't satisfy his/her need, or there isn't any offer available, then the user can create a request by filling in a request form. The form includes attributes such as type and model of equipment, quantity, and tags. The system will send suggestions with current offers that would best match the searching criteria if there is an acute need for satisfying the request.

Value proposition

We provide value by enabling simple and easy access to medical equipment and specialists, and by creating cost-reduction and profit-making opportunities.

Parties on our platform

Supply-side

Specialists Our specialists include nurses or medical professionals with specific respiratory training (e.g., pulmonologists, perfusionists, anesthesiologists) who are on a full-time contract. In some hospitals, they are underutilized. Or they are retired or have changes careers into something else and interested to help out. For this hackathon's purpose, they have training in operating medical ventilators for treating Covid-19 patients.

Equipment owners Our equipment owners are hospitals that have a surplus of ventilators inventory and human resources, which can be lent out to other hospitals in need of ventilators and specialists to operate them. Others included in this category are universities and research centers that have in their position medical ventilators and can lend them out to hospitals in need.

Equipment producers Our equipment producers are local companies that are dedicating their efforts to produce ventilators based on designs from major MedTech players. In a later stage, when proper certifications are given, the pool of equipment producers will be extended to include new local workshops or production sites that are using open-source ventilator designs to develop and produce ventilators for needed parties.

Demand-side

Health and treatment providers Our demand includes hospitals, treatment centers, and elderly homes treating Covid-19 patients. The demand side would expand together with the supply side to include other equipment types and specialists.

How I built it

We've used miro.com for building the lean business model canvas, doing user mapping, and analyzing user flow. And for the high fidelity mockups, we used proto.io.

The plan is to use this tech stack:

Desktop (Web):

  • LAMP-Server
  • Linux operating system
  • Apache HTTP server
  • MySQL relational database system
  • PHP programming language

Mobile:

  • Android - Java
  • iOS - Swift 5

Challenges I ran into

Forming a team and finding needed resources (we couldn't find a UX/UI designer), gathering information, and validating our business model and ideas.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

All the effort this team has put on building the business model, presentation and video, and high fidelity mockups, and the plans made for bringing the idea to life.

What I learned

Getting more familiar with the health care industry's opportunities and challenges. Got great support from our mentor Hannah Bock-Koltschin, and Alex_Health_Biz_ZS, and Carmen Santa Cruz. Practiced teamwork and team-building skills.

The impact potential

We believe the potential of our solution is enormous as it will bring together equipment producers and owners, skilled medical professionals, and health care providers (hospitals, treatment centers, clinics, care facilities, and nursing and elderly homes). We would welcome new equipment producers and companies from other industries that produce medical equipment in times of crisis. The model can be expended and help NGOs and other organizations that are activating in crisis and Disaster Relief Management situations. More equipment categories can be added to our platform and pairing them with more specialists.

What's next for HealthSurge

Our vision is to become the place to go for finding medical equipment and specialists, and create synergies at EU level.

  • Collaborate with hospitals, medical staffing, and recruitment companies, suppliers and producers of medical equipment, MedTech experts, trainers
  • Building and testing a functional prototype
  • Iterating and validating together with customers
  • Applying for funding, establishing a company, and hiring& outsourcing missing skills (UI&UX Designer, developers, experts, marketing; Zero-knowledge technology and data security consultants, legal help for GDPR compliance)
  • Collaborate with the European Commission and Health authorities so our solution can help parties across EU
  • Expanding the platform to other verticals on the supply and demand side: incorporating other medical devices and equipment that hospitals can exchange (tomography ); exploring adding a new demand-side group - NGOs (Red Cross and military hospitals)
  • Creating a community where equipment experts, trainers, specialists, and health care providers meet
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