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got blood?
Inspiration
Blood is one of the most important parts of our medical system, but a large proportion of blood is wasted every year. This was something one of our members (Ayo) was surrounded by at her time volunteering at blood drives at the Red Cross in high school, which is what initially drew us to this project! According to some estimates, up to 200,000 bags of blood are wasted every year (extrapolated from https://www.aabb.org/news-resources/news/article/2023/04/26/nbcus-survey-number-of-blood-collections-transfusion-stabilize-in-the-u.s), which translates to massive economic and social inefficiencies within the healthcare system, with plenty of volunteers and effort required per bag of blood. Ultimately, one of the biggest reasons behind this is their disjointedness — there exists no centralized source to guide decisions as to how and where blood flows, and how individual blood banks run their operations.
What it does
Our application provides a centralized source for hospitals to make coordinated decisions on how blood is distributed amongst hospitals. The first is to facilitate national communication amongst different blood banks, allowing for blood to be requested and shared more effectively across regions amongst hospitals. On a larger scale, all of this data is also used to inform the means by which blood is collected: Hospitals can run targeted advertising campaigns for specific blood types for shortages even in geographically disparate locales, something not possible with the current state of blood management.
We use a smart score, generated off the combination of distance, surplus fraction, and other factors to determine what blood should go where.
How we built it
We used React, Auth0 Flask, Mongo and Mailchimp as our main development tools, as well as a lot of granola bars and iced tea.
Challenges we ran into
Choosing such a broad topic meant attempting to spread ourselves thin and combine back together was a pretty difficult strategy. We also struggled with timing; we went back and forth on a couple of project ideas even as we began building our project, so coming up with more effective brainstorming ideas to best capitalize on time would be an ideal future pursuit.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Many of us worked with these technologies for the first time during this project, and we were proud that we were able to develop an application with such a wide range of challenges over the course of this hackathon!
What we learned
We learned a lot about a wide range of technologies encompassing all parts of this project; some of us learned more about encryption systems, others tried to build their first major project with React, and others learned more about the logistics and science behind blood technologies.
What's next for got blood?
Getting a more streamlined way of getting and keeping data updated would likely be a major avenue of improvement, as well as experimenting with graph networks offered by Mongo (which does have its pluses and minuses!) would likely be next on our list of potential improvements. Another potential avenue of exploration is in making our data more detailed; for instance, our DB has hidden fields meant to point towards average age of the blood, which in combination with measures of spread could provide a relatively predictive analysis of blood to better motivate future decisions surrounding the topic. Training an ML model on a simulated graph environment to optimize usage and cost-effectiveness of blood transport was another topic we were elated to potentially explore further in the future.
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