tell my GP

tell my GP is a web app that allows patients of a GP surgery to track their COVID-19 symptoms daily and send to their GP. This will help triage patients who require person to person assessment. tel my GP will also help GPs to track the health of their community and feel part of it at the time of isolation. In the current state, there isn’t a unified system that collects patient information and share with the GPs. When patients call 111 that data isn’t available to the GPs to see.

As part of #UKvsCOVIDHack, 5 of us came together to build a web app working with Amy Chapman(GP) and Amy Colori (Clinical Oncology) to try to connect COVID-19 patients with their local GPs.

The web app

Both patient and the GP surgery creates an account in the app. GP surgeries will get a unique code through our NHS contacts to make sure only genuine surgeries register with it.

Patients, once registered will go through a questionnaire that will help the GP asses their conditions. Using an algorithm this questionnaire will score the patients and provide a traffic light system to the GP view to sort the patients whose condition is deteriorating at the top.

Each patient is expected to fill the form daily to give the GP ability to compare the results and see the trend in symptoms. This way GP will be able to track the patient without having to have face-to-face interaction and contact them if they think they need an in person examination.

The demo

The tech

To keep things simple and lean we decided to build a website using Gatsby, React, Material UI and Firebase.

At the Front-end, as the patient and GP views are very similar we used the same components to build the pages with relevant content for different views which allowed us to finalise the pages quickly. The modularisation also helped us to keep the number of views at a minimum considering the time constraints. For the back-end, we needed to do a bit of learning for NoSQL databases and iterated the DB design a few times. However, Firebase was easy to use for authentication and out of box emailing helped us for ease to implement as privacy and security are important factors for the app.

For now, the questionnaire is hard coded. We didn’t have enough experience with the questions, answers and the scoring to make the right decisions for the database structure. It needs to be iterated over with real users before we can build an efficient system that can scale and last longer. Working with Amy Chapman we have created meaningful set of questions using support of NHS guidance for the GP to asses the patients condition. Each question has a score and the overall score is used to asses the traffic light system (green, amber, red) that is used to inform the GP.

We also needed to add relevant warnings especially for the patients who are considered as high risk so the web app doesn’t turn into another waiting room for those ones who need immediate medical attention.

The team

We are at the back-end Jay Hostan and Remi Boulier; at the front-end Kainy Ryu and Rachelle Ragasa; coordination and wire-frames Sezin Cagil. Gizem Cagil designed the logo for the app.