Sylwia VargasHello friends!
I am really happy to share with you that an app that I created together with Sruti Modekurty and Dr. Tavish Nanda (Columbia University Medical Center) is live and hit 1,1k visitors. Read more about:
Demo 🖼
Here's how it looks:
About the App 📱
This app is for medical professionals to perform a basic assessment and risk calculation of a COVID-19 patient ending up in the ICU, developing Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), and mortality. It is designed to help practitioners quickly review pertinent data and make informed decisions. With many hospitals facing equipment shortages, the app may be able to help divert resources to the patients who are at greatest risk.
The Process 🗺
✨ the challenge ✨
In order to estimate risks, medical professionals need to refer to three different studies, the findings of which are summarized in excel sheets. Well, that's a lot of clicking and comparing.
✨ the solution ✨
Sruti and I asked Dr. Tavish Nanda to draw and explain to us how he'd like to have the app look. We understood that it would be helpful to have an app listing symptoms that the medical professionals can check and then compare their severity across the studies.
✨ coding ✨
Once we knew that, we drew component hierarchy and divided work. We used github issues for project management, WhatsApp for communication (at least two check-ins daily) and when we were merging bigger branches, we would have a zoom "merge party". After we had an MVP, we deployed the app and sent it to Dr. Nanda.
✨ feedback ✨
There were a few feedback loops with Dr. Nanda alone, and then also after user testing with his colleagues. This is when we incorporated e.g. the calculator and the risk bar. Acting on feedback definitely took much more time than setting the app.
Key Take-Aways 📚
✨ build to scale ✨
I'm going to state the obvious but initially, we built our app to be just the MVP, or, in other words, not to scale. And then we received much more new data with nested questions 😱 and we had to redesign the state, which took a lot of time to refactor.
✨ don't rely on Bootstrap ✨
Even to this day, we have this ux/accessibility issue that is a result of Bootstrap being Bootstrap. I have reached out to StackOverflow and to Dev's #help tag but to no avail!
Contribute 🤜🏼🤛🏾
If you want to help out, please do! We are accepting well-scoped PRs. Here's a list of current issues but we are also open to your creativity — however, please create an issue first so we can make sure it's not being done by someone else.
