I participated in BlueHack this weekend – a hackathon hosted by IBM and AmerisourceBergen. I got a chance to work with an amazing team (Xiaoxiao, Charmgil, Hedy, Siyang and Michael) — the best kind of team-members you could find at a hackathon. We were mentored by veterans like Nick Adkins (the leader of the PinkSocks tribe!), whose extensive experience was super-handy during the ideation stage of our project.
We are hacking Dermatology at #bluehack with @nickisnpdx @TweetTrilochan #PinkSocks @SciPitt @PittTweet pic.twitter.com/9gA3Ka3hS6
— Gaurav Trivedi (@trivedigaurav) October 13, 2018
Our first team-member, Xiaoxiao Li, is a Dermatology resident who came to the hackathon with ideas for a dermatology treatment app. She explained how most dermatology patients come from a younger age-group and are technologically savvy enough to be targeted with app-based treatment plans. We bounced some initial ideas with the team and narrowed down on a treatment companion app for the hackathon.
We picked ‘acne’ as an initial problem to focus on. We were surprised by the billions of dollars that are spent on acne treatments every year. We researched the main problem in failed treatments to be patient non-compliance. This happens when the patients don’t understand the treatment instructions completely, are worried about prescription side-effects, or are just too busy and miss doses. Michael James designed super cool mockups to address these issues:
While schedules and reminders could keep the patients on track, we still needed a solution to answer patients’ questions after they have left the doctor’s office. A chat-based interface offered a feasible solution to transform lengthy home-going instructions into something usable, convenient and accessible. It would save calls to the doctor for simpler questions, while also ensuring that patients clearly understand doctor’s instructions. Since this hackathon was hosted by IBM, we thought that it would be prudent to demo a Watson-powered chatbot. Charmgil Hong and I worked on building live demos. Using a fairly shallow dialogue tree, we were able to build a usable demo during the hackathon. A simple extension to this would be an Alexa-like conversational interface, which can be adopted for patient-education in many other scenarios such as post-surgery instructions etc.:
Hedy Chen and Siyang Hu developed a neat business plan to go along as well. We would charge a commitment fee from the patients to use our app. If the patients follow all the steps and instructions for the treatment, we return a 100% of their money back. Otherwise, we make money from targeted skin-care advertisements. I believe that such a model could be useful for building other patient compliance apps as well. Here‘s a link to our slides, if you are interested. Overall, I am super happy with all that we could achieve within just one and a half days! And yes, we did get a third prize for this project 🙂