Pivot!
Hello everyone!
Since your inspiring and helpful contributes, we as a team, decided to update our project from the original idea pivoting it to the far more impacting new usage context. We also changed our name project in ResQ, we hope you’ll like it :)
Following is our updated project’s abstract which includes some of the ideas mentioned in the previous comments.
Thank you!
- Our project in a tweet
ResQ is an app for physicians working in emergency contexts, that digitalise the health information of patients, so to make them easily available for colleagues.
- Problem that our project is willing to solve
Currently, the first aid provided to refugees arriving in Italy is effective in terms of solving the main health issues (healing of hurts due to the journey, or state of fever), but at the same time is not very efficient because of the superficial anamnestic research that physicians are compelled to make in such situations.
In addition, the information gathered about the health state of each patient, are stored in simple paper sheets, preventing a further the potential of a pervasive sharing that a digital format would easily allow.
The current way of working shows the following problems:
- The language barrier prevent a proper communication between the physician and the patient. Is usually delegated to the patients the duty of providing the accurate information about their health condition every visit.
- The missing digitalization of the gathered health data and the consequent discontinuity of the healing process.
- The limited precision of the anamnestic research due to the high number of patients and the short time available.
- Final User, individuals and community target
ResQ is conceived to ease the communication among physicians (involved in critical context such as temporary hospitals and reception centers) regarding the health state of foreigner patients who don’t know the language of the hosting country. In this way, the tool is designed for physicians, but the main benefits will come for migrating patients whose this services is dedicated to.
- Solution, brief description of the project
ResQ is a mobile management tool that improves the communication among healthcare workers (especially physicians, but also volunteers, nurses etc etc…), getting as a result the reduction of the language barrier that very often doesn’t allow foreign patient to fully explain their symptoms or their own pathologies.
The personal pathological condition besides being a psychological kind of weight, for instance when a patient has to explain multiple times his/her condition to a series of different medical specialists, it could also lead to misinterpretation and diagnosis issues when there might be a language barrier.
ResQ is conceived to to be used mainly during the period in which the migrant still doesn’t own a “Codice Fiscale” (personal unique fiscal code), but only a STP card (Straniero Temporaneamente Presente), that makes her/ him able to benefit from the main national healthcare services (for 12 months maximum).
The reception centers that provide the STP card and give the first medical assistance, have to deal with a very high number of people in a stressful situation that often lead to a superficial treatment.
In this way we designed an agile gathering data tool that saves time and in few minutes would be able to fulfill a complete health history of the patients. Also, the digitalization of such a document would make possible an extensive sharing with colleagues that later will take care of the same patient.
Therefore the physician will have the chance to communicate autonomously among themselves without misunderstanding through the management tool.
- Technologies we will adopt
The tool we are designing will be developed in order to be accessible from the main devices available on the market. Therefore we envision applications possibly developed in their native languages as Java or Android and Objective-C foe iOS ambients.
Even though we believe a mobile tool might be most suitable solution for the specific usage context we are working on, we would like to provide also a multi-platform responsive app developed in HTML5.
The cloud service might be developed in NodeJS, with database in MongoDB and MySQL.
- Website
Under construction.
- Licence
Opensource
What question
How to help refugees in getting a more efficient healthcare service?
What problem
Language barriers often lead to misunderstanding and psychological weight for foreigner patients.
What solution
ResQ is an app that connects physicians over common patients, providing a complete overlook to minimise language barriers.
@alessandro contini @silviad.ambrosio @ChiaraFrr @Costantino