Patient Protect

Home Page
Checking a medication by scanning the QR code
Drug 1 is okay to take
Administering the medication
We can see that the medication has been administered
Try to take Drug 1 again
Try to take Drug 2, it has a dangerous interaction with Drug 1
Allergic to Drug 3
Allergic to Drug 4
List of Drug Allergies

Inspiration

We were surprised to see that there is a real problem with medical errors in the United States. With approximately 250,000 patients affected every year, we wanted to create a solution to address patient safety. 44% of medical errors were medication-related as people could administer medication that they are allergic to or medication that has dangerous interactions with medication you are already taking.

Therefore, we created Patient Protect, a mobile app dedicated to protecting patients from medication errors, especially the ones who are less knowledgeable in medicines. Our app lets you scan medication to determine if it is safe to take, based on adversarial drug interaction, patient allergies, and the administration interval.

What it does

Patient Protect uses your phone camera to scan QR codes that look up the medication in our database. By cross-referencing patient records including known medication allergies as well as current prescriptions, we can determine if the medication is safe to administer. This medication administration management platform allows you to track previously taken medication as well as view your medication allergies.

How we built it

We used React Native for our mobile app as well as Flask with Python in the backend. We used Firebase realtime database as storage to store the medications hat the users have and keep track of when user have taken it.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to come up with a solution that we were happy with that addressed the concerns that were causing problems for patients. We wanted to be sure that our mobile app provided support to reduce the number of patient errors involving medication.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our dynamic application that allows you to scan, administer, and track your medications in real-time.

What we learned

We learned a lot about writing a backend in Python with Flask as well as building mobile applications in React Native. This was the first time some of us were using this tech stack and there was a learning curve that we had to go through.

What's next for Patient Protect

Patient Protect can be extended to further address different types of medication administration errors including dosage, time, and other adverse affects of medication administration errors.