HealthBridge | Devpost

User Interface

Inspiration:

Living with rare diseases or dealing with serious medical conditions often involves isolation, lack of information, and limited access to expert advice. After doctors prescribe treatments, patients can feel left in the dark without support and insight from others. HealthBridge was born from the need to bridge the gap between patients and reliable, real-time support from both peers and medical professionals. We wanted to create a space where people with medical conditions could easily access not only expert insights but also emotional and practical support from others who are on the same journey.

What it does:

HealthBridge is an online community where patients prescribed for rare diseases connect directly with peers and doctors. Doctors are the only ones who can invite patients into support groups, ensuring that only verified members join. The platform offers three core features: chat groups based on specific conditions, a tailored news feed featuring relevant medical articles and updates, and a peer-support system that provides both emotional and practical guidance. Doctors can also actively participate, giving personalized feedback while patients also learn from each other, creating a holistic support ecosystem.

How we built it:

The layout is an intuitive, user-friendly layout that has everything you need in one view. Using modern web development tools like Typescript and CSS, we created a three-part interface: a sidebar for toggling between support groups, a central chat view for conversations, and a right-side tailored newsfeed to provide users with up-to-date current condition-specific information. The backend integrates with healthcare systems to ensure that only patients with a doctor’s invite can join the community.

Challenges we ran into:

A large challenge was finding ways to integrate the backend into a seamless user experience while maintaining accessibility for patients with varying levels of tech literacy. Creating complex queries to scrape for news feeds or ensuring real-time communication were initially difficult to implement together. Another major challenge was ensuring the privacy and security of users’ medical data, which would require strict encryption and compliance measures.

Accomplishments that we're proud of:

We are particularly proud of how we've integrated multiple feeds and user experiences into one platform. By creating chat rooms, news discussions, doctor insights, and different support group pages, we are fostering an environment where patients receive timely, accurate medical advice alongside peer support. Additionally, we’re proud of our newsfeed algorithm, which continuously learns from users’ upvotes and downvotes to curate the most relevant medical content for each patient.

What we learned:

Firstly, we learned how to be much more efficient in our software development process. There were many new tools and mentors we gained along the way. But more importantly, throughout this process, we also learned the importance of empathy in building a platform for patients with rare diseases. We recognize the importance of fostering a sense of belonging and trust in such a delicate community. Engaging both patients and doctors in the same space helps close the gap in patient care and improves outcomes through collaboration.

What's next for HealthBridge:

We’re excited to expand HealthBridge to cover more rare diseases and conditions, or perhaps mental health conditions eventually. Our future plans include integrating machine learning to provide even more personalized support and exploring partnerships with healthcare providers to scale the platform. We also plan to introduce more interactive features, such as expert Q&A sessions and virtual patient-doctor consultations to further enhance the platform’s value.