Medica : A Centralized Healthcare System

There’s lack of immediate access to data regarding medical services leading to poor healthcare services throughout the country. Patients struggle to find proper information regarding medical facilities. This leads to a weak network of information among the general populace. Rumors and referrals from friends and family get trusted, instead of having a solid source of data. This has been a source of many cases of undocumented malpractice in the country.

We aim to provide infrastructure to promote a system for the patients, to review doctors and practitioners, to get information about which services are better, and location-specific recommendations for their needs in case of emergency. This will help the general public to avail a proper source of important information and provoke an incentive among the medical practitioners to improve their services.

This if scaled globally will benefit every single people seeking medical aid.

A gap exists in our country, between medical practitioners, and people who need medical services. This gap is filled up by middlemen, who are often corrupt, or asks for unfair prices for setting up appointments. Also, there exists another issue with ambulances in our country. Due to lack of a centralized and robust hotline like that of the first world countries, we often do not have access to an ambulance that would take us to the nearest hospital in case of emergencies. The medical services are, in summary, too scattered, and lacks a proper system. Our project aims to fill these unseemly gaps, and make centralized medical services a reality.

We aim to make a platform, that provides readily available medical services to everyone with proper access to an internet connection. A person seeking medical services, can search our platform to find doctors, nurses, caregivers, ambulances, and pharmacies, that can fulfill their needs. Its not necessary to pay a middleman (unofficial appointment setter) unnecessary fees, it is also not necessary to look for certain doctors by asking around. Every medical service would be indexed, every medical practitioner classified, so that a person can look for these services himself.

The infrastructure of our country is not yet fully developed, and thus this solution would be very crucial for many. Also, if possible, the government can make the service free to be accessed from any national telecommunication provider, similar to how Facebook Zero worked. That would even allow rural people to have access to this platform, without purchasing a data plan.

The target population whose lives we aim to improve with our solution, are mainly the civilians of our country. Medical services should be accessible by all, but more importantly, it should be easy and convenient. That was a key factor in us deciding on this solution.

As citizen of this country, we have seen the issues of a very bad medical system from childhood. Our mothers and fathers have suffered, as did our friends and classmates. It was not so much a matter of cost, but a matter of access and management, something our country could not invest in, being of underdeveloped status. We always dreamed of seeing any improvement of our medical system.

As the years went by, the country has improved gradually, but the medical system is still as bad as ever, even worse in a few select scenarios, where corruption is involved. If you set up an appointment, you would have to pay a high fee to someone who plays the role of the 'receptionist', but these people will also sell your medical records and prescription details to pharmaceutical representatives who stand near them like vultures. Our platform aims to remove these middlemen entirely, and create a connection between doctors and patients, free of cost. The doctor's fee would be the only fee, in that regard.

You cannot ask anyone to call an ambulance, as there is no centralized emergency hotline that provides that service yet. You have to call private hospitals and request one. If a hospital is close to you, and you are not aware of it's existence, in the event of an emergency, you are left with the option of calling a hospital that is miles away for an ambulance. You could have walked over to your nearest hospital, gotten emergency treatment, and perhaps even made it back home, in the time it takes for the ambulance arrives from that far-away hospital. Moreover, this fact applies to almost everyone in the country. So it would not help if you asked the people near you to tell you what the nearest ambulance-offering hospital is. They do not know. Our platform aims to index these services, so that emergencies can be treated as emergencies.

From a legal standpoint, doctors who are blamed with malpractice, often do not face the consequences of their actions in this country. Rather than aiming to fix the legal system of our country to stop doctors from mistreating their patients, we believe it would give them a better incentive to stop, if their popularity dropped among the general populace. Our platform assigns a dynamic, authenticated rating to all medical practitioners, giving patients awareness of whom to avoid when making an appointment, and giving doctors an incentive to not commit malpractice.

All things summarized, we want to help people who are frustrated with the lack of a proper medical system in our country. That includes everyone.

Our people often suffer due to limited knowledge regarding the availability of medical services. The patient may not know that their new doctor is guilty of medical malpractice. In a medical emergency, one might not be able to find the nearest hospital which provides an ambulance. The people put their faith in corrupt middlemen who set up appointments for an unrealistic price. These are all of these are cases of misinformation.

With a centralized system, all of this information will be more available. This would allow people and their communities to be well informed, as well as stop misinformation from spreading.

This is an idea we had in our mind for quite a long time. We always wanted to try and make a prototype for a "better medical management system" to help the people of our country. As students of undergrad Computer Science and Engineering, we had a database course, where we were asked to select a project idea to work on. We saw this as an opportunity to implement our ideas on a small scale, making use of our freshly learned database and web development skills. We were still freshmen at that time. We lacked the proper resources to host the site on a server, but we could make a working prototype.

A centralized medical management system may or may not be innovative in the case of first world countries. But in a country such as Bangladesh, this would nothing short of revolutionary. Nowadays, the people of our country has progressed to the point that almost everyone owns a phone, and most of these phones have internet access. So far, the existing medical management systems are quite poorly designed, offering limited services. Our proposed solution is an aggregation of all available medical services in our country, properly indexed in a way which people can search for, select and rate the services in a safe manner. Their medical records will also be private and encrypted.

The mere existence of such a system, if we can deploy this, can inspire others to work on a better one, or any other service or platform derived from our ideas. We will always encourage the development of any technology that aims to help the people in an altruistic manner.

In addition, there is room for potential improvement among the services of offered by medical practitioners if our platform can be deployed nationwide. There will be an active and healthy competition due to the rating system of these practitioners, the ratings being given by the patients. Corruption can be cleared in a few key areas of our existing medical system.

Lastly, the availability of information regarding medical services will aid the most in spreading misinformation among communities. This is valid in third world countries like Bangladesh.

The solution was initially proposed as an academic project. We measured our progress based on the critical reviews and feedbacks from our faculty members.
The progress of solution towards its goals, after its launch, will be evaluated based on interviews and questionnaires provided to the system users. We also intend to formulate a work-plan for upcoming days, defining the scheduled project activities and milestones. This work-plan will help us to track our progress and identify the pending activities.

7 members-

• Ishraq Hasan
• Muhammad Munswarim Khan
• Naim Ibna Khadem 
• Kazi Tasnim Rahman
• Md Rokonuzzaman Reza
• Shaqran Bin Saleh
• Dhrubo Barua

We are Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) undergraduates and currently we are in our final year. Through our academic courses, we've developed technical expertise required to deliver the solution. In addition, we are under supervision of expert CSE faculties for conducting our academic projects.