Allied Health Navigator
- Creative Fields Experience Design
- Challenge URL healthhack.com.au
- Github Link github.com
Allied Health Navigator is a proof-of-concept app to make ADHD treatment and service provider info more accessible to parents and patients – devised, designed, and built over a single weekend at Health Hack 2016.
The Problem
Parents with children affected by ADHD have no clear source of up front information regarding professional links and allied services which makes it hard and frustrating to get the right help for their children.
Currently, they have to rely on Google searches for information or the government website which only provides medication information and generic lists of doctors that parents have to go through and vet for themselves. Paediatricians and other healthcare professionals have access to various documents with information on ADHD and lists of specialists in WA but this information is currently passed around manually.
Early intervention is critical for best patient outcomes, but the wait time in some areas to see a paediatrician has increased to over 6 months for assistance with a developmental, behaviour or learning difficulty. Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider, and making sure parents have all the information they need in advance will produce real benefits for patients and parents.
"Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider will produce real benefits for patients and parents"
Early intervention is critical for best patient outcomes, but the wait time in some areas to see a paediatrician has increased to over 6 months for assistance with a developmental, behaviour or learning difficulty. Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider, and making sure parents have all the information they need in advance will produce real benefits for patients and parents.
Our Solution
Allied Health Navigator consists of a client app built with the Ionic Framework and Node.JS, and a PDF scraping engine built with PDF JS that is able to extract provider data from government-published PDF handouts and convert them to a JSON format the app can display.
The benefits here are twofold – for the end-user; information becomes searchable and filterable in a simple and clean experience that works across platforms. Later, rich native features can be added such as push notifications and calendar integration to facilitate appointment tracking.
From a management and maintenance point of view, scraping PDFs – while unconventional, avoids creating another orphaned data-management app that in an overburdened health system runs the risk of serving outdated or incorrect information – or not being updated at all.
As the app is data-agnostic, if in the future resources allow for a better solution to PDF directories – a data management interface can be easily created. Additionally, API integration with services like HealthEngine is possible.
Allied Health Navigator is a proof-of-concept app to make ADHD treatment and service provider info more accessible to parents and patients – devised, designed, and built over a single weekend at Health Hack 2016.
The Problem
Parents with children affected by ADHD have no clear source of up front information regarding professional links and allied services which makes it hard and frustrating to get the right help for their children.
Currently, they have to rely on Google searches for information or the government website which only provides medication information and generic lists of doctors that parents have to go through and vet for themselves. Paediatricians and other healthcare professionals have access to various documents with information on ADHD and lists of specialists in WA but this information is currently passed around manually.
Early intervention is critical for best patient outcomes, but the wait time in some areas to see a paediatrician has increased to over 6 months for assistance with a developmental, behaviour or learning difficulty. Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider, and making sure parents have all the information they need in advance will produce real benefits for patients and parents.
"Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider will produce real benefits for patients and parents"
Early intervention is critical for best patient outcomes, but the wait time in some areas to see a paediatrician has increased to over 6 months for assistance with a developmental, behaviour or learning difficulty. Reducing the barriers to finding a healthcare provider, and making sure parents have all the information they need in advance will produce real benefits for patients and parents.
Our Solution
Allied Health Navigator consists of a client app built with the Ionic Framework and Node.JS, and a PDF scraping engine built with PDF JS that is able to extract provider data from government-published PDF handouts and convert them to a JSON format the app can display.
The benefits here are twofold – for the end-user; information becomes searchable and filterable in a simple and clean experience that works across platforms. Later, rich native features can be added such as push notifications and calendar integration to facilitate appointment tracking.
From a management and maintenance point of view, scraping PDFs – while unconventional, avoids creating another orphaned data-management app that in an overburdened health system runs the risk of serving outdated or incorrect information – or not being updated at all.
As the app is data-agnostic, if in the future resources allow for a better solution to PDF directories – a data management interface can be easily created. Additionally, API integration with services like HealthEngine is possible.
The Team
Emma McCormack – Med Student
Gabby McGrath – Business Analyst
Jonathan Van Buren – Developer
‘Frames’ aka Lyndon White – Developer
Rowan Ashwin – Developer
Patrick Chalkley – Experience Designer
Problem Owners
Dr. Desiree Silva, MD – Paediatrician
Dr. John Wray, MD – Paediatrician
Dr. Michelle Toner, PhD – ADHD Coach & Consultant