CareAccess

Guiding patients through their emergency journey with ease and empathy

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Inspiration

The emergency department is often associated with anxiety, confusion, and long waits. While healthcare professionals work tirelessly to save lives, patients and their companions are left in uncertainty, unaware of what’s happening next. We wanted to tackle this emotional and logistical challenge, transforming the patient experience into one that is informed, calm, and engaging.

What It Does

CareAccess is a digital companion designed to improve the emergency room experience. It combines transparency with emotional support by:

  • Providing real-time updates on patient status and queue position.
  • Offering personalized tools like guided breathing exercises, calming sounds, and engagement activities to reduce anxiety.
  • Allowing patients to track their journey through a clear visual timeline
  • having access to a chatbot to ease the waiting process on them

How We Built It

  • Frontend: Built using React
  • Backend: Integrated with the provided mock API to simulate real-time ED updates.
  • Design: Prioritized an intuitive, calming user interface using soothing colours and minimalistic layouts.

Challenges We Faced

  • Balancing transparency with empathy: We didn’t want the app to overwhelm users with data, so we carefully designed the language and visuals to be reassuring and clear.
  • Ensuring privacy: Respecting patient confidentiality while providing meaningful updates required thoughtful data handling and anonymization; where the client signs in with their given ID at the reception and no password is required to maintain privacy.
  • Time constraints: Building a comprehensive app in 24 hours required strategic prioritization of features.

Accomplishments

  • Successfully created a calming, informative app prototype in just 24 hours.
  • Innovatively tackled a real-world problem in emergency care using empathy-driven design.
  • Built a website that can be accessed through a QR code in the ED; so that the existing healthcare systems are not required to work on the system to implement the additional feature. ## What We Learned
  • The power of empathy in design: A patient-centered approach can transform stressful situations into manageable experiences.
  • Iterative development under pressure: Focusing on core features first allowed us to deliver a polished prototype on time.
  • The importance of teamwork: Collaborating effectively ensured we tackled multiple complex aspects of the app simultaneously.

What’s Next

We aim to:

  • Enhance the emotion-tracking capabilities with AI-powered sentiment analysis.
  • Expand the app to include multilingual support for a diverse patient population.

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