Health Information Management
Designing and developing a technology solution for health information management for patients
Background
My objective was to both design and develop a technology solution to any problem I chose. This was part of my Internship at Intellect Design Arena Ltd., Mumbai in 2017. The project was done under the supervision of Mr. Anuj Dhokai, Vice President & Project Director at Intellect Design Arena Ltd.
The domain I choose to tackle was Health Information management for patients. In India, digital literacy and smartphone penetration have been steadily increasing over the recent years. Despite this, the practical use of technology in health data management has been fairly limited.
Since my parents are doctors, I was able to gather useful insights into how the healthcare system in India works and what aspect could be improved using technology.
Role
This was a solo project. My role was to perform competitor analysis, planning, wireframing and development of the software solution.
Problem Description
- Maintaining Medical Records
Currently, there are a lot of entities involved in the process of getting treatment. Apart from the patient and the doctor, there are also diagnostic labs as well as other hospitals and doctors that have been referred or have treated the patient previously. Making sure that the doctor is updated with the patient’s medical history is of utmost importance. If the patients try to recollect through their memory all the past medications or procedures, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee accuracy or may inadvertently leave out seemingly insignificant details that could be of vital importance for an accurate diagnosis. - Tracking Vaccinations
Vaccines for adults and children often have strict schedules that need to be followed. Keeping track of this can be a difficult task especially with multiple members in the family.
Competitor Analysis
- I chose to perform competitor analysis to understand what other products in this space chose to focus on.
- Around 14 competitor products were surveyed. These products ranged from ‘mobile only’ to cross platform services.
- The features analyzed were listed on the basis of
- Popularity
- Ease of Implementation - Insights from doctors were considered as well while deciding which features offer the most value.
- Based on this, the features that were the most desirable to implement were identified.
Personas
I chose to develop personas so that it could be possible to evaluate the solution against the needs of the users and whether it is able to solve their problems.
Wireframes
I sketched out wireframes and iterated upon them, to define various flows and journeys of the web application.
Flow of the application
- Users can login with an existing account or register with a new account.
- If the user is new, some information is collected after he/she logs in with their newly created account credentials.
- Users are greeted with the dashboard which contains all their upcoming doctor appointments and vaccination schedules.
- There is the ability to add a vaccine or appointment, which adds itself to the list chronologically.
- All upcoming entries are tagged with the person they are meant for.
- Users can then view their profile which contain all their medical information such as chronic conditions, allergies, records of surgeries and medical reports.
- Each section has the ability to add more entries as required.
- The profile also contains emergency information regarding whom to contact in case of a medical emergency.
Implementation
The software was developed as a web application. It was made using HTML, CSS, Javascript, JSP and Servlets. I was advised to use a 3 tier Architecture to implement the application.
- Java Server Pages displayed the information to the user.
- All requests passed through a Servlet which called the appropriate functions.
- Accesses to the MySQL database take place only through the Data Access Object.
- A Java bean object was used to communicate data between the Servlet and the Data Access Object.
Screenshots of developed application
Source Code
You can view the entire source code at: https://bitbucket.org/varun_pimple/project_titan
