Care Exchange

Care Exchange Home Page 1
Care Exchange Home Page 2
Care Exchange Doctor Dashboard
Care Exchange Patient Dashboard

Inspiration

The process of transferring medical records between doctors is tedious and can cause significant delays in receiving vital healthcare. Patients transfer their medical records for many reasons such as a need for specialization, travel, switching doctors, and keeping their records updated. This process can slow down treatment and be frustrating. Our team wanted to create a solution that not only simplifies the transfer of medical records, but also ensures that both patients and healthcare providers have immediate access to necessary information. By leveraging global FHIR standards, we aimed to streamline this process and improve healthcare efficiency.

What it does

Care Exchange is a web app that allows patients to upload their medical records and documents to a ‘patient’ dashboard. These documents are immediately parsed and converted into FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) format, the standard for medical data storage used by hospitals around the world. This ensures that healthcare providers can easily access and interpret the data in a standardized format. On a separate ‘doctor’ dashboard, doctors can also view the documents a patient uploads and request access to their entire medical history, significantly speeding up the transfer process between doctors and reducing the risk of delays in critical healthcare services.

How we built it

We developed the front end using React.js and Tailwind CSS to create a simple, responsive user interface. For the back end, we used Node.js and MongoDB to securely manage patient data. A core feature of Care Exchange is the automatic parsing of patient-uploaded documents into FHIR format. We implemented this by integrating a public FHIR server into our backend and web scraping FHIR documentation to ensure that the data was accurately converted. This allows for smoother data interoperability between different healthcare systems and hospitals.

Challenges we ran into

One of the primary challenges was integrating the public FHIR server into our backend to automate the conversion of patient documents into FHIR objects. We had to overcome technical hurdles with web scraping FHIR documentation to ensure the formatting was correct. Another challenge was designing a sleek, user-friendly interface that was intuitive for both patients and doctors while keeping the functionality clear and efficient. Additionally, safeguarding patient data and ensuring secure document uploads and access was a critical challenge that required special attention.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are particularly proud of our successful integration of the FHIR standard, which allows for easy access and interpretation of patient data across hospitals and healthcare providers. This dramatically reduces the waiting time for document transfers and ensures that doctors can provide timely, informed care. We're also proud of the intuitive, clean design of our web app, which makes managing and sharing medical records straightforward for patients and healthcare providers alike.

What we learned

We learned about healthcare data management and the importance of using industry-standard formats like FHIR to ensure interoperability across medical systems. We also gained experience in web scraping, API integration, Amazon S3 for file storage, Artificial Intelligence to parse the data, and frontend design. Throughout our developing process we improved our planning and time management skills as well.

What's next for Care Exchange

In the future, we plan to enhance Care Exchange by adding features like appointment scheduling and integration with EHR (Electronic Health Records) systems used by hospitals. We also aim to improve the security of the platform by adding features such as multi-factor authentication. Expanding to mobile applications is another step we plan to take to make Care Exchange even more accessible for patients and doctors.