Sahay | Devpost

Inspiration

Hospitals are like a warzone in these times, and the battle keeps getting harder. Especially for the doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers who are going without sleep for days on end to fight this battle. With no end in sight, the exhaustion of resources is here, and you cannot throw a stone without striking someone whose loved ones have either suffered a loss or are in critical conditions due to lack of resources. Just one look at any social media platform, Twitter, Instagram will make it evident the government isn't helping the hospitals enough, and in turn, the citizens have taken it upon themselves to tirelessly provide and validate Covid-19 Resources. There is an urgent need to rectify this lack of materials between the hospitals which turn down critical patients, and working alone cannot solve the problem.

What it does

Essentially, we provide hospitals with a platform to display all of their resources (like their medical supplies and equipment) and their staff, to keep them in check. It also gives you information about all other hospitals, and their capacities, in a certain radius. Using this information, hospitals can place requests - and their level of urgency - for any commodities or capacity. Thus working together, and pitching in their resources, all our medical faculties will be able to manage the huge influx of patients and lack of equipment without too much worry. These resources once shared, the transfer of supplies is validated with the use of blockchain technology.

How we built it

Prototype was built on Figma, along with branding The app was built using VueJS and Ionic. We used a MongoDB database and used a NodeJS API to interact with it. The promotional website was built using Vue 3. Blockchain functionality was implemented using Google Cloud Platform and Python. The Web App was built with express and rendered using the pug templating engine.

Challenges we ran into

Storing images onto Blockchain, was something we discovered to be the way harder than it looks like and was seemingly impossible to figure out within a few hours. We hence decided to opt working with strings. The way to do it is store it off the chain, unless you use IPFS.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Heavily researching the only thing close to our idea - hospital management programs - we built a service that not only has clean, minimalistic UI/UX, but also does not require any training to use, thus saving Hospitals and our users' money and hours to train a person. The fact that we could code in an almost replica of our design prototype into the final product was an impressive achievement for us. We also explored and delved into many new technologies, simultaneously learning and implementing blockchain technology into our product within less than 36 hours.

What we learned

We learned more about the what and why to the problems of resource shortage in our country, and realised the stark difference in statements from nearby hospitals, with some pleading for certain resources and some within a few kilometres of radius saying they had excess resources. Yet there seemed to be no solution to these problems, and that led to the existence of our project. We learned more as to how blockchain technology can be used to verified items across the globe through something as simple as ID codes, which can validate the source of the supplies _ (tackling the major problems like the black-market of essential life saving medicines and drugs, and the dilution and fake products in the market.) _

What's next for Sahay

So we aim to provide a service to assist the medical industry in any way, and not binding with financial constraints. We would start off with a low scale release and testing phase, with around a 100-200 users. Over the next month or two, start with funding to get it into a stable state and later release it into Delhi with a marketing campaign. If things go well, over the next 1-2 months we expand on our hospital database and provide our SaaS to even more hospitals. Later we plan for a nation-wide launch, get some sort of approval and help from the government to allow our team to expand. Sahay is not only limited to India and can also spread internationally, as it is essentially an application and wouldn't require too much effort to push ahead.