Clinic Direct

Inspiration

A Chinese girl died of cerebral hemorrhage due to 120 (Chinese ambulance) delayed treatment. If the medical attention had been more prompt, the girl most likely would not have died. This shows that there is much room for improvement in transportation to medical care, which we tried to address in this project.

What it does

Our app connects the three most essential elements in medical transportation, the patient, the driver, and the hospital. What differentiates the software from other possible apps, such as uber, is that it has the built-in functionality to both talks with a medical professional, and focuses on speed. There are several features that highlight this focus, the patient being able to view the driver’s progress towards them, the non-refusal duty of the driver, and the on-call nature of the driver. The app also features a built-in way for the patient to alert the driver of communicable diseases, which reduces the risk of transmission. Compared to ambulances, this app focuses more on low-to-moderate emergencies. This can save ambulance resources for more needy patients, and can also alleviate the unwillingness to call an ambulance for fear of the financial burden.

How we built it

We use FastAPI as a Python backend framework and Ionic as the front for this application. The communication between the back and front end is based on REST API. Then we hosted the backend on a Cloud VM and the front end on GitHub Pages. The text message is sent by Twilio API. We also used domain.com for our domain: http://gp.clinicdirect.tech/html/PatientSide_CallDriver.html. It is not shown in the video because that was in debug env. Our logging system is made with CockorachDB. It is not shown in the video but in the code. It is in a library called logger in the main dir.

Challenges we ran into

For most of our team, this project served as an introduction to UI development, GitHub, and front and back-end app development. Given the time constraints, we had to work quickly both to learn and code. Two of our team member has little to no coding experience before. However, they tried to learn HTML and simple JS during the proces

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have created a usable prototype for an app that could have positive consequences on society. In addition, we were able to overcome a relative lack of experience in both programming and app development and get a finished product on time.

What we learned

Much of our team learned about the technical development side of app creation. For example, one team member learned how to incorporate google maps with our app to send the driver directions to the correct locations. Another team member learned how to use HTML to develop the UI. However, almost our entire team learned about the necessary elements to create a usable app. With the exception of one member, none of us had gone through this process.

What's next for ClinicDirect

To get this app off the ground, a reasonable next step would be to create a partnership between local hospitals and the app developers in local communities. This would ensure that the communication with the hospital’s function can be used and thus highlighting the contrast with competing rideshare apps.

Built With

• fastapi
• ionic
• javascript
• python