Project Idea | Re-Medi

Project Title: Re-Medi

Introduction and Need
India, the country known for its vast and diverse culture, scaling one of the fastest growing economy, housing the world’s third largest defence force, is also unfortunately known for its rising poverty rate and population explosion. While the country is trying to come up with solutions to these problems, a strict and a health care system is required for the welfare of the mass. Let’s explore some stats before arriving at an optimum solution and meeting an idea that could revolutionise the medical industry and healthcare management system of not only this country but of all other who is grovelling through the same phase.

• As per the reports of First Post dated on 3rd January 2018, “India has less than one doctor for every 1, 000 citizens, which is less than the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard that prescribes a doctor-population ratio of 1:1, 000. There are not thousands, but lakhs of poor people in far-off rural areas who don’t have access to timely healthcare, due to the sheer unavailability of qualified doctors.”
• According to BW Disrupt – “We Don’t Have Enough Doctors in Rural India. That’s Why We Need Telemedicine. 70% of India’s population live in rural areas and 3% of the doctor population live in rural areas. That’s why we need telemedicine – so that the majority of India can have access to basic healthcare.”
• As per Quartz’s report, “India continues to struggle with providing basic medical care for its citizens. It is estimated that 600 million people in India are with little or no access to healthcare, many of them in rural locations. There are 750, 000 doctors in India, which amounts to only one for every 1, 425 people. Inhabitants that seek out treatment face long-distance travel, and often settle for care at the most convenient locations instead of finding the specialised care their conditions demand.”
• According to The Economic Times, “Nearly 75 percent of dispensaries, 60 percent of hospitals and 80 percent of doctors are located in urban areas, serving only 28 per cent of the Indian populace, says a new report released by KPMG and the Organisation of Pharmaceutical Producers of India (OPPI). India world-classld class private healthcare sector and only one-third of the population can access this. There is a huge mismatch which needs to covered.”

With the advent of Digital Revolution in the country, we tried to come up an idea that could harness an innovation in the wireless space along with cloud computing and pervasive technologies such as ubiquitous sensing and data analytics we can fundamentally shift the paradigm in healthcare delivery and dramatically improve the healthcare service in rural areas. Ultimately we have the opportunity to create a new “infrastructure- independence” model of healthcare, which translates into the right care, at the right time, wherever people need it.

The IDEA
We are trying to develop a remote healthcare system starting to provide service right from the patients end to the complete term of medication as prescribed by the doctor. So it starts with medical kiosk centres set up in all parts of the country focussing primarily on those rural areas where good medical service fail to reach or where the people are too poor to harness the medical facilities.

Conceptual Framework
Below mentioned are the steps and how the idea will be implemented in the real world with step by step procedures, discussing the features:

1. Patients may approach the kiosk centres where there will be a medical attendant with very basic medical training so as to understand the patient’s problem and perform basic tests like blood test, cardio test, breathing test and so on.
2. The details will be fed into a computer along with the generated reports such as any blood test report, or x-ray or heart or breathing report along with a unique ID supposedly the Aadhaar number of the patient and unique domain of symptoms the patient is going through.
3. These data will be uploaded into the cloud available privately to all the registered doctors. The doctors specialized in a particular domain can only access those patients details whose problems coincide with his/her specialization. Suppose a cardiologist can only access the data of heart-patients. This will be available to doctors 24*7 letting them accessible from any part of the country. So the doctor need not be physically present to check the patient instead a virtual system is created for the interaction of patients need with the doctor’s supervision.
4. Following this, the doctors can prescribe medication to the patients by logging in to a website from where all the patient’s data can be accessed. The doctor can look into the patient’s detail and go through the digital reports and come up with a digital prescription. The prescription will be delivered to the kiosk centres and an SMS will also be generated and sent to the patient’s phone telling about the name and time of intake of medicines and interval of medication.

There will be a pre-installed app which will perform multiple operations as mentioned below:

5. Once the prescription is fed by the patient or it can be auto queried into the app, a list will be generated by mapping the prescribed medicine/drug salt with the drug-database and all the possible options for each drug will get enlisted. Users will have several options – he can search for the availability of each medicine separately in terms of price (those who want cheaper substitutes) or distance in their locality; he can get the list of pharmacies that have all the prescribed medicines, so that the user doesn’t have to look for each medicine separately in different stores; he can search for only generic alternatives; he can search for Jan Aushadhi Kendras for availability.
6. The app will also provide info about drug’s side-effects, dosage, composition, reviews and will have a Pill Reminder to remind the patient to take his pill as per the time set by him(useful in case of old people to never miss their dose).
7. Following this a message would be regularly sent every day to the patient’s registered mobile number, containing the time of medicine intake. Another part of the project would be of detection of the time from the received SMS, and trigger alarm accordingly to remind the patient to have medicine accordingly.
8. The app can also be set to an automatic mode to retrieve the queries of time of intake and a reminder alarm will also be triggered at the same time. The android app will serve the patient as well as the general public.
9. Once the user finalises the pharmacies/pharmacy, the linkage with google map may provide the clue to all the Medical Shops and Drugs Stores present in the vicinity/ or the city selling the drug (stocks at most medical shops are now linked due to GST). The app will help the patients to locate pharmacies as per their convenience in terms of lower price(due to many generic alternatives) or navigating to the nearest pharmacy or both. The mapping of the drug list with the availability in the vicinity is done by an Inventory database containing all the shared inventory details of shops nearby.

Flowchart or Total Workflow

Workflow – Database handling of Medicines, its generics, salt etc.

ER diagram- Doctor-Patient relationship for the Consultation Webapp

ER diagram- Salt database To Map Medicine name with their Generic Alternatives

ER Diagram- Stock DB used for Mapping Real-time stocks of drug of shops with their Location Areawise

Workflow of SMS Service

We tried to frame a very basic model of the system. The actual model will need an implementation of a large-scale hardware system with a highly secured environment as already mentioned in the kiosk service.
Working at Doctor’s end
We tried to design doctors end web application through which, doctors can register themselves and again login to access data from different patients. They can also view reports that have been stored in the database in file format. The patient’s detail can be registered using admin panel with proper administrator user id and password. This web application will run in any browser of choice.

To complete the application we have used Django, a Python-based web framework and the SQLite database that comes along with it. To enhance the front end, we used bootstrap.
The application carries pages like- registration page, login page, patient details page etc.

Below given are the screenshots of how the page looks and a link to the code published in the GitHub profile:

Here is the Code: GitHub Docs End

The SMS Reminder – Working
This project uses Python libraries and Flask, a python based web framework for its completion. On the back end, we used the Mongo DB and JSON for the database management. So basically we tried to inherit the properties of PyMongo to complete this piece of work. To send SMS we used the HSP SMS service and its various functions.

To begin with, we have created two configurations file: one containing the configuration information for the Mongo database i.e., port number, DB name, collection name and retry attempts, and the other configuration file contains the information for the sms system i.e., API key, username, sender name and interval.

We used basic HTML and Javascript to create the input form and check the validations for the input field. We build a python file to establish a connection to our database and control the execution of the command. Firstly we import various functions from various libraries like import ConfigParser to read the configuration files, date time, JSON, Flask, MongoClient etc.

Then we read the database configuration file to establish the connection to the database and also assign the host and the port number in which the app would run. Later we get the information from the form when the submit button is hit and store the information in the Mongo database.

The link to the Code: GitHub Android App

Tools Used:

• Django
• Front end technologies including HTML, Javascript, CSS, Bootstrap
• PyMongo
• Databases like MySql, MongoDB
• HSP SMS Service
• The actually working was run using Docker.

Application:
It is end-to-end solutions that facilitate continuous access to healthcare information, expert advice or therapeutic intervention enabled by remote sensing, ubiquitous telecommunication network, and smart systems and platforms. The application can be well understood in the Introduction and Need part.

Note: This project idea is contributed by Prashant Mishra and Chinmoy Lenka for ProGeek Cup 2.0- A project competition by GeeksforGeeks.