We made hospitals safer for patients and personnel
We designed this app to help with contactless pacient intake (also known as triage) in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic
I participated in a hackathon in the spring of 2020. It was right after the first COVID lockdown had started, and the hackathon's theme changed overnight to help the current situation in any way. I was lucky to have three medicine students on my team who had experience from actual hospitals. So, we could quickly detect a problem that hospitals had that we could try to solve over one weekend's hackathon.
The problem
What can we do to help?
My teammates had firsthand experience with this problem; they had helped in hospitals as medical students. And from there came the idea that visitors could fill out that questionnaire on their phones, eliminating the need to sanitize things. This idea sounded doable, so we began sketching out what the experience could look like. We wanted to have a prototype ready for the final pitch at the hackathon, which gave us less than two days to work with.
The first concept
We encountered problems with data privacy and decided not to send any medical data over the internet. The visitor would simply enter the information into their phone, where it would be stored locally in the web browser. When entering the hospital, they would present a QR code generated by the app to the triage worker, who would scan it with their phone and receive all the information entered by the visitor. They would check the information, confirm it and enter their risk assessment granting or revoking the patient's access to different wards at the hospital or requiring further examination. The patient would then scan back a new QR code that contains the date and hospital employee who approved them, digitally signed and verifiable by any other hospital employee.
Prototyping
One of the constraints was that not all users had the app installed when entering the hospital, so we decided to build a Progressive Web App (PWA) that would work in any browser, focusing on the mobile experience on any smartphone from the 4" iPhone SE to the 6.7" Samsung Galaxy Note 10+.
Before we arrived at the final design, we tested multiple QR code versions and settled on the one that provided the best scanning success rate even while being outside in the sun, having to deal with screen reflections.
Field testing Smart Triage
We were fortunate that the FNKV hospital in Prague let us test our app with real users, actual hospital patients. We ensured that each patient had the option to fill in the required questionnaire on paper or in our app (we did not force anyone to use the app).
Getting to test our app with people from our target audience immediately showed us where we skipped some steps and needed to explain what we expect the user to do in the app. We added a lot of supporting help text to describe why we require personal information and how the data is being processed securely.
Final Web App Design
Moving most of the buttons and inputs to the bottom half of the screen made it easier for users to enter information one-handed while standing in the queue at the hospital.
With the help of friends, we translated the app into Czech, English, and Slovak - the most commonly spoken languages in Prague, where we were based.
Results
Comparing our app to the traditional pen and paper questionnaire:
- We decreased the number of patient's physical contacts from 2 (pen and desk) to 0
- We decreased the time to check in a patient by 50% - thus decreasing the number of people waiting in line at any point in time
- We decreased the consumption of disinfectant and single-use protective equipment due to decreased number of physical contacts and thus reducing expenses for the hospital
- Our code is open-source and can be found on GitHub
- Although the application did help based on our metrics, we did not find a business model to secure further development, and the project ended - though the website is still live at https://nemocnice.online