Currently, China is facing a serious problem: the shrinking willingness for people to become a doctor. We found that one major causes of this problem is the intense patient-doctor violence in China, and our government is trying to solve this by making better laws to protect the doctors. However, this is a solution that can only have superficial effect. According to our fieldwork in big and small hospitals(SH). We found that patients narrow to big hospitals(BH) while there is very little in small ones. Another big problem is many of the patients can easily treat their illness in SH or clinic. But they still choose to go to the people-flooded BH. The phenomenon causes a very big problem: big-hospital doctors(BHDs) have patients to deal with all day long, while small-hospital doctors(SHDs) can even have several cups of tea in their office. BHDs may only talk for a few sentences to patients who want to know their situation and ask next patient to come in(this is probably why patient-doctor conflicts usually happen in BH).
We want to make use of the spare time of SHDs. But according to our interview with two doctors, the patients don’t trust SH. Patients will even go to BH for very small illnesses(this is why there is no shortage of doctor population in China but there is still problem that looks like lack of doctors). So, our solution is further narrowed. We want to make the patients believe SH and make those who have small illnesses to come back to SH and leave BHDs more time to explain the situation for patients with big issues.
Then we got the rudiment of our solution: we want an online system to divide patients from BH into SH. The doctors we interviewed further told us that not all BHDs have good skills and not all SHDs have bad skills. So we also want our solution to become a platform for patients to know the doctors(for there is literally no means right now). So, the essence of our solution is an online platform for patients to know about the quality of each doctors around them, where to find, how long to wait, etc. We want this platform to transform the current hospital-oriented doctor-finding modal into a doctor-oriented doctor-finding modal. The new modal have many benefits: make use of SHDs, increase the doctor-patient communicating time, prompt the doctors to improve their skills, etc. Our platform should incorporate these features: doctor information, some sort of verifying system for SHDs and giving those who passed some kind of endorsement, locating service, good comment system, etc. Our platform may also be a measure to allocate doctors’ reward/wage.
We also know our solution is far from perfect since this problem is really really complicated. But we believe that our platform can do help for the current situation. According to the doctors we interviewed, they all said that if this App has an influence in society, they will try to use it.