askAgain

askAgain connects doctors and patients worldwide for affordable second medical opinions. Using GenAI chatbots and NLP bots, we aim to reduce misdiagnosis and reduce cognitive load on doctors.

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Inspiration

As soon as we learned that healthcare was a significant focus of this year's hackathon, we were immediately compelled to build a project addressing the exorbitant cost of healthcare. The cost of healthcare is disproportionately high or low in certain areas of the world, even though the quality of healthcare is relatively the same. Fueled by this, we decided to build a platform to connect doctors and patients worldwide, allowing patients to access a variety of medical resources at reasonable costs while doctors broaden their client base.

Furthermore, such a digital system can also be used to prevent misdiagnosis and increase diagnostic safety. By providing easy access to a second opinion on an initial medical diagnosis, patients can reduce mishaps by corroborating a medical diagnosis with a second, independent doctor.

What It Does

askAgain connects doctors and patients from around the world for affordable second medical opinions. Using our custom virtual nurse chat bot, we reduce cognitive load, ensuring streamlined healthcare, and reducing the possibility of erroneous diagnoses.

A powerful feature of our app is the custom virtual nurse chatbot. This chatbot reduces the cognitive load on both the patient and the doctor by providing a simple and easy pre-diagnosis process. This is important as cognitive overload is a major contributing factor in misdiagnosis and errors during routine patient care. The chatbot does not provide any actual medical advice; instead, it matches the patient to a relevant set of doctors from which the patient can choose.

The patient can interact with the chatbot, providing information about their current medical condition. The chatbot also asks clarifying questions and follow-up prompts, ensuring that it obtains a comprehensive understanding of the patient.

Once the patient is connected with a doctor, they are scheduled for a time when they are both available, and they will meet virtually during this time. During the meeting, a bot listens and takes notes of the conversation, later compiling the notes into a comprehensive summary.

How We Built It

We built our backend and frontend in Next.js using JavaScript. The large language model is provided by Google's cutting-edge Gemini platform which scrapes the web for information on the latest medical topics.

We integrated a bot api that joins scheduled meetings and provides meeting notes to avoid cognitive errors.

Challenges We Ran Into

While we were initially ambitious, we later realized the sheer scale of this project. To handle the new and updated workload, we effectively divided tasks among team members. Half of the team focused on all patient-facing functionality, while the other half focused on doctor-facing functionality. We spent the last hours of the hackathon merging and troubleshooting issues.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

We're frankly quite proud of the platform we've developed. To be as humble as possible, integrating a patient/doctor scheduling system, an AI chatbot capable of identifying medical conditions, and an NLP model for transcribing and summarizing live meetings between doctors and patients—all in just two days—was not an easy task. We're proud of having worked together to achieve this goal, and we're excited to see where askAgain goes in the future.

What We Learned

  • Effective Team Collaboration: We learned the importance of dividing tasks based on expertise and maintaining clear communication channels to handle the project's complexity and scale.
  • AI Integration in Healthcare: We gained valuable insights into the challenges and best practices of integrating AI technologies within a healthcare platform, particularly regarding accuracy and reliability.
  • User-Centric Design: We learned the critical importance of designing interfaces and functionalities that cater to both patients and doctors, ensuring ease of use and accessibility.
  • Regulatory Compliance: We discovered the complexities of ensuring data security and privacy in a global healthcare platform, emphasizing the need for compliance with regulations like HIPAA.

What's Next for askAgain

The next step is scaling up our platform and recruiting doctors to join our platform. Doctors have already shown interest, and we genuinely believe there is a spot in the market for our solution.

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