Volunteer Doctors

The health systems are collapsing due to COVID-19 but many doctors older than 60 are not in hospitals but they could still help online. We proposed a platform to connect patients with these doctors.

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Inspiration

In the middle of COVID-19 pandemic situation, we have found in social networks like Facebook and Twitter many health professionals offering their services to the community for free in order to help reduce the load in hospitals. Seeing this, we, a group of developers and technical professionals, decided to build a platform to orchestrate those efforts and maximize the help from those volunteer doctor

What it does

The platform has two sides:

  1. The side for patients that are looking for a doctor to make a medical question for some illness. So we have built two channels: 1. A responsive web form with some questions as triage and 2. A chatbot in WhatsApp with Watson Assistant as AI Framework that also asks some questions to the patients. All the patient requests are saved in a database.

  2. The side for volunteer doctors that would enter a secure login page. They should register first in order to validate their medical registration records and get access to the platform. After they get into the page, they will see all the patients request records and could auto-assign one request by themself and resolve.

How I built it

We have used a combination of technologies like:

  • Django framework for the web backend.
  • Node.js for the webserver for the patient's webform also for the chatbot
  • Gupshup API for getting WhatsApp access for the chatbot
  • IBM Watson Assistant for getting AI capabilities for the chatbot

Challenges I ran into

We have three main challenges:

  • The short time to develop this in parallel with our normal job.
  • We all live in Perú, and right now we are in strict quarantine, so all the communication was online.
  • Get the medical institution that could validate the doctors was very difficult because of they all busy right now.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

A good enough solution that would help many people built in a short time.

What I learned

What's next for Volunteer Doctors

  • Automate the volunteer doctors identity validation with a Digital Onboarding solution
  • Implement a LiveChat solution in order to centralize the communication between the patients and volunteer doctors. Also, it would better protect the doctor's contact information from

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