WestERnScheduling

Inspiration

Recently I burned my hand quite badly and went to the ER to have it treated. It took 4 hours for a doctor to see me, for less than 15 minutes. A 4 hour wait time is unfortunately considered to be "not bad" in much of Ontario.

What it does

Our program uses a combination of weather, population density, and proximity data, as well as a calendar of community events to predict the number of patients expected in an ER on any given evening. This tool will help hospitals to better estimate their need for doctors, nurses, and support staff, and hopefully reduce wait times.

How we built it

In a whirlwind of caffeine and Papa Johns... Additionally, we built our project by utilizing a series of python scripts. Our python scripts make use of a weather api, google maps api, and a date time api to provide relevant data for our calculations. Additional data were sourced from several studies as well as London census data.

Challenges we ran into

The first large issue we ran into was the lack of historical data on the number of ER admission to London hospitals. We addressed this by building our program to take the 5 year average for that date as a parameter. As this is a prototype, we would expect that any real-world implementations would be accompanied by better data from the hospital, and so we could compute averages ourselves. Another challenge we ran into was being able to make our program accessible to admin through the use of a website. Our design initially involved using WinSCP to host an HTML frontend serviced by a php file which would run and interact with our python script. Unfortunately, we were unable to overcome this challenge but will work to improve this in future development. And a lack of Papa Johns...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One of the things we are proud of is our concept, as it addresses a real-world challenge, and we believe our project if fully implemented could have a significant impact on improving the current scheduling system in ER's. An accomplishment we are proud of is our ability to create a functional program in a 36 hours.

What we learned

Form this process we have learned that good programs take time and cannot be rushed. This is why we plan on continuing the development of this application after Hack Western ends. Also Papa Johns is good pizza but King Richies is just better value.