SwiftER

Logo
Front Page
Map Page
Pre-Screen Page
Pre-Screen Summary Page
Confirmation Ticket

Inspiration

Picture this: a stuffy room filled with strangers who are all sick and hopelessly waiting for a doctor. This unfortunately is the reality of hundreds of thousands of Ontarionians each day. Ontario’s healthcare system is prized for its accessibility due to its free healthcare, however there are flaws to every system. Ontario is plagued by the lack of resources to streamline proper care of patients who are in need of emergency aid. With this, our team decided to come up with SwiftER, a WebApp that allows users to track live waiting times and initiate the pre-screening process before arriving at the hospital. With this, we hope to make the lives of Ontarionian’s better each day. As people who have dealt with the firsthand effects of the Emergency Room, we believe that SwiftER has the possibility of shaping Ontario’s healthcare into a system that supports everyone regardless of their background.

What it does

SwiftER enables users to easily access live waiting times of over 20 hospitals around the GTA and start their pre-screening questions before arriving at the hospital. With its easy to use interface, our platform allows anyone regardless of age to access it. Furthermore, users are able to contact these hospitals and visit crucial sites that may help a users decision in where to go when they need emergency aid. Our site successfully teaches users how to distinguish between the need to go to the ER and the need to utilize 811. Ultimately, SwiftER truly streamlines the process and we are confident that if it were integrated with Ontario’s healthcare system, it would improve the lives of thousands of people.

How we built it

Home Page: Our home page drew inspiration from various websites, which we studied to create a user interface using HTML, CSS, and JS. The result is a design that is both fitting and seamless for the SwiftER experience. We also ensured that our users clearly understand how our website operates and how it benefits them by helping them locate the nearest hospital with the shortest ER wait times.

Map Section: We decided to use MapBox to display our expansive full-screen map due to its great free plan and ease of use. We drew inspiration from various map websites such as apple maps to come up with a beautiful design using HTML, CSS, and JS. We stored the large list of hospitals with their addresses in a json file and linked it to the sidebar, displaying hospitals in southern ontario. The data also includes ER wait times that dynamically updates as new data is received.

Backend: For the wait times, we initially tried to use beautifulsoup on python to try to scrape the data. This caused multiple problems since some sites had dynamic elements and others had images for the wait times. We solved these problems by switching to selenium to scrape the data. Using python we went through the data and set it into the format that is used for the map. To connect the data gathered by python and our front end we sent the data to a JSON file and fetched it using javascript.

Question Section:

We utilized a lot of open-source UI elements to better the user experience. We used the HTML form element to create the question forms. Buttons were also used to navigate the whole site. We spent a long time ensuring that the buttons were in the correct orientation, were the correct colors and led to the correct pages. This was extremely hard for us as we were new to programming with this language.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the development of our project SwiftER, we have faced a numerous number of challenges that tested our problem solving skills and adaptability. One of these challenges was figuring out the language. Originally, we considered using Python, Java, HTML, and other languages. However, we ended up finalizing on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a bit of Python. We knew that it would be a long and treacherous challenge, but we wanted to learn new languages and push ourselves to our limit. Another big challenge we faced other than choosing the language was the debugging part– linking multiple Replit files, troubleshooting, etc. We were forced to consult various sources to aid us and fortunately, we prevailed!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are so proud of this project because this is the first time we used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is a major accomplishment for us because we are all beginner programmers! Thanks to the internet and its plethora of open-source resources and documentations, we were able to successfully accomplish our goal all within a day! We hope to continue our coding journey by delving more into these languages and even by learning new languages!

What we learned

We learned how to scrape the web for information using Selenium. We also learned how to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build a functioning website. Next, we learned how to connect different files together to better streamline the user experience. Finally, we learned how to make UI objects using an open source catalog of UI objects!

What's next for SwiftER

We hope to incorporate SwiftER with Ontario’s healthcare system. This is our biggest goal, and a goal we truly hope to accomplish as we are aware of the struggles people face with the waiting times of the Emergency Room. To do this, we hope to better improve the functionality of SwiftER by fixing parts of the map and fully integrating the pre-screening process to actually connect it to local hospitals around Ontario!