ASAP — A Smarter Access for PHCs

This is the solution that we proposed for the Pune Smart city hackathon, mentioned earlier in this publication by Anwesha Dash.

We intended to solve the problem faced by Pune Smart city under its latest development plan. The problem statement that we addressed is quoted below:

“Pune has about 2.5 hospital beds/1,000 population, against the benchmark of 4 for urban India. Moreover, approximately 70% of the beds are in the private sector. In terms of primary healthcare centers (PHC), for a population of 60 lakhs, dispensaries and maternity hospitals provide a coverage of only 1 PHC per 1 lakh population against the norm of 1 PHC per 20,000. Pune has already started work on improving access to healthcare in the city through various initiatives such as mobile healthcare vans (currently covering 28 areas in Pune), Vasti clinics (currently 20 clinics to improve the healthcare access in slums) and implementing the Urban Poor Health Scheme (subsidized healthcare through the Urban Poor Health Scheme card). Pune now intends to implement smart solutions to increase the access of Primary healthcare.”

The priority areas identified within the Public Health theme which we tried to solve are:

1. Increasing utilization of healthcare infrastructure and staff
2. Managing medicine procurement and inventory
3. Efficient record-keeping of patients
4. Enhancing emergency care across all areas of the city
5. Efficient grievance handling
6. Ensuring hygiene and cleanliness at PHC’s
7. Evaluation of staff and PHC’s

Pune Smart CIty Hackathon

Our idea was to give better PHC services to the different sections of a society using an interactive online interface. Primary health care leads to the overall well being of a society and implementing development practices in this domain ensures the development of the entire city.

The stakeholders of this Interface are as follows:
1. General Public
2. PHC staffs
3. PHC Administrators
4. PHC Medicine Store keepers
These users are involved in this project which aims to simplify the working of PHCs as well as the convenience for the public to access the services.

This interface provides services as Doctor’s information, medicine inventory, faster arrival of an easy booked ambulance, ease access of report, staff management with feedback and grievance filing.

Our team consisted of Pooja Agarwal, Siddhant Mund, Anwesha Das and me. We divided the whole work among ourselves.

Technologies We Used:-

1. EJS(Embedded Javascript): a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript.
2. CSS(Cascading Style Sheets): for styling purpose.
3. Bootstrap: to build responsive, mobile-first projects on the web.
4. Javascript: is a high-level, interpreted programming language which is characterized as dynamic, weakly-typed, prototype-based and multi-paradigm.
5. Jquery: a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library.
6. NodeJS: is designed to build scalable network applications.
7. ExpressJS: fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js
8. socket.io: is a library that enables real-time, bidirectional and event-based communication between the browser and the server.
9. MongoDB: no-SQL database used for storing data in a secure way.
10. multer: for storing the files in the database.
11. Mapbox API: for importing the maps of cities.

Features :-

We used administrator validation process for maintaining the database of doctors through which all the information about doctors is available to the user.

MongoDB is used to maintain the medicine inventory which involves the medicine store keeper as stake holder and provides the medicine procurement for public.

The lab admin will update the lab reports in the database through multer-storage as per patientID and billNo which can be accessed by the patient digitally.

We involved the chatroom facility of socket.io where all registered ambulances can view the user request and the nearby ambulance will accept the request and reach there as quick as possible.

Through the posts of requirement and available staff details the administrators can manage the surplus and deficient situation in PHCs.

Administrators can take action according to feedback, complaints and reviews submitted by patient or their relatives.

A working demo of the project can be found here. We are open to suggestions for improvement 😄.

Due to lack of presentation skills and insufficient innovation in the idea among the top 50 teams, we could not find ourselves among the winning teams. But now as we are familiar with our flaws we are trying to work on them. We are applying to more hackathons and are trying to raise this project to its full potential.