Health on the Go app for AngelHack Hackathon
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In areas without mobile data, how can health care professionals access patient data
- A patient record system which authorised users (Health Care Workers) could query using SMS
- A Rails Application that medical staff can sign into, input patient information and input medical information
- The Doctor or Health Care worker can also query this data through SMS (using Twilio) and receive an immediate update
- Ability to digitise current records
- Ability to add to patient records through SMS
Better Outcomes for Patients - Lack of access to their history and medical data affects treatment chances of patients considerably. Removing this barrier could increase their chances of recovery.
Eliminate Pain Point for Rural Doctors - Having access to patient history and patient test results in real time give Health Care professionals a better understanding of the most effective treatment to administer.
Better Understanding of Health Care trends - With more effective data collection, more in depth analysis about community health and trends can be done.
Fundability
- The market for this is in communities which have mobile signal but do not have access to mobile internet
- Patient data can be anonymised and used for research projects
- Could also be funded through community health projects and charities keen on improving global access to healthcare
- It could be a sustainable business model as it could be provided as SaaS with a monthly fee
Execution
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We focused on building an MVP which incorporates some of the most important features
- Medical professionals can sign in with their credentials and create/update medical records for each patient.
- Medical records are stored on a database.
- Medical professionals can query the data by sending a text to the Twilio number with the patient's name.
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Technology used: Ruby on Rails, Twilio API
UI/UX
- We spoke to a doctor in Nigeria who highlighted the difficulties he has with treating patients in rural areas. The things we had to take into account:
- Limiting queries to only vital information so that length of texts can be kept short
- Ease of use for patient information input from admin teams
- Ease of use in querying the data
Originality
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While leaps have been made in the rural healthcare space, such as tele-health (which allows rural doctors to communicate with specialists to obtain a better diagnosis), there has been little done to improve recording and accessing patients' data in rural areas.
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Implements a solution where mobile data/internet is not required. Users only need a basic phone with ability to send and receive messages.
Scalability
- While we would focus on one small community to test out our concept, this can be expanded to other rural communities easily.
Impact
- It will make an impact through improving healthcare in rural areas.