Project Idea | (Health services & Medical outcome monitoring)

Project Title: Tracking quality of health services and medical outcome of the clinic visits to encourage health seeking behavior among the underprivileged.

Domain: Android Application

Problem Statement (Introduction):
Health systems in India are grappling with the effects of existing communicable and noncommunicable means to cater to the needs of the people. Lack of adequate progress on these underlying social determinants of health has been acknowledged as a glaring failure of public health.

Our main motto to take up this problem is to cater to each and every need of the patient as well as monitor his/her health from the time he/she first visits the hospital till he/she totally recovers.

Additional attention and adequate support to ensure faster recovery is not possible as there is no proper communication channel/link between the doctor and the patient after the check-up.

Due to insufficient data obtained in the form of feedback the government is unable to do the necessary improvements required in this field.

According to the statistics, feedback from merely 5-10% of the patients is collected monthly from any of the government aided medical centers.

The course of medication prescribed to patients is not monitored.

The staff is not monitored in terms of their behavior and supportiveness towards the needs of the patients.

Proposed Features:

Maintaining records of the patient for future use

Giving them reminders

Monitoring prescriptions given to the patients

Changing the prescription according to the availability of the medicines in the inventory to provide low-cost health services

Taking feedbacks over certain interval(through the algorithm we came up with) to keep track of patient’s health and report it to doctor

It will not only help us monitor the health services provided to the people but will, in turn, gain the trust of the people visiting these health centers.It will also encourage people to use medical facilities when required.

Stage: Proof of concept done.

Research: We have tried to solve the problem by going to its root cause, we went to few hospitals near by and approached staff and patients, and asked them about the problems and difficulties they face while taking or giving feedback. And why most of the time people don’t give feedback. We got the most common response as the procedure is big, so they skip it.
Algorithm: We have devised an algorithm to take feedback in easiest possible way.
Steps:
1) Doctor will enter course of medication, as soon as it is complete, our system will send feedback questions as SMS
2) Patient just have to enter marks for each question out of 5 or 10.Example given in the picture.
3)This Response SMS will be received by our system.
4)Using our logic(heart of our algo) we decode the sms and send it to our DB.
In this way, the hectic process becomes just a formality of a minute and one can easily do it from any basic(feature) phone, there is no need of Android phones.
(We have successfully completed this part in PoC and devising algo for other features)

Approach and Flow:
1)FLOWCHART(Feedback cycle): Taking timely feedbacks and providing the necessary medicines according to the prescription given by the doctor and storing all the data collected.

Feedback Cycle

2)FLOWCHART 2(FB list generation & updation): List of patients whose feedback is to be collected is generated on daily basis.The same is done, and necessary feedback is sent to the doctor.

FB list generation & updation

3)FLOWCHART 3(Doctor’s FeedBack analysis): Necessary information such as health ,prescription,improvement,etc are sent to the doctor on daily basis. Depending upon the health condition of the patient the doctor decides whether he/she requires a follow-up. If yes, then the patient’s name is appended to the next day’s feedback list in order to make him aware about the follow-up.

Doctor’s Feedback Analysis

FLOWCHART 4 (FB Evaluation & Report Generation): As the feedback collected from the patients is now available in a raw format, this data is then processed according to some predecided criterias and statistical data is generated.Every month two reports are generated (1)Monthly report (2)Till date report (previous months+current month). This data is stored in the NGO’s database and is also sent to the concerned authorities.

FB Evaluation & Report Generation

Tools Used: Android(Java & XML) & SQLite

Inspiration for the project(Source of Idea):
No change in treatment as the patient is not recovering because there is no contact between patient and doctor.
One such problem was experienced by my maid. She was taking treatment in one of the medical centers for Jaundice. There was no improvement in her health even after following the prescription. Due to which she was hospitalized. By taking timely updates about her health, this worse situation could have been avoided.
Sometimes people forget to take medicines on time so timely reminders would help to solve this problem.
In Spite of medicines provided by government are available in the inventory, patients are asked to buy medicines from outside.

This incident made us think what exactly is the flaw in the system and how can we solve and contribute to the society.

Find Github repo here.