MedDevice Search

Inspiration

While watching “The Bleeding Edge”, a Netflix original documentary, we were deeply disturbed by a case study where a female experienced excessive bleeding after implantation of a sterilizing device, lost her job, lost her family and was told by her doctor that women of her race just ‘bleed more’. She later found online communities of other women experiencing the same (there were 16k reports of this product to the FDA in 2020 alone), and after a long fight induced the manufacturer to pull the product off the market. After watching the documentary, we researched what options were available to people to learn more about their medical devices. Our initial search provided disappointing results. We knew we had an opportunity to build an application that would be a part of solving this problem.

What it does

MedDevice allows medical device users, like the female described above, to easily check and understand their devices’ FDA clearance process. It also helps connect patients to the FDA’s official reporting mechanism and online communities of patients who are experiencing the same problems. We hope to empower patients and help open up the black box that is the medical device industry. Now patients can make more informed decisions when choosing between multiple options, better understand their medical device, easily report their issues, and connect with patient communities.

How we built it

We began mapping out our project in Zenhub, which is a GitHub extension that integrates a kanban board into a GitHub repository. We borrowed ideas from agile methodology to create, assign, and manage tasks in GitHub. Then, we checked out the FDA’s publicly available APIs, located here: https://open.fda.gov/apis/, in order to understand what type of information we would be able to display on our website. Lastly, we created our designs in Figma and implemented them using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

We initially hoped to combine multiple FDA databases to provide a seamless search functionality for our user. But we had to re-evaluate our project scope given as there were no unique identifiers that could allow us to complete it. As time was limited and all of us did not have a background in healthcare nor are experienced coders, we spent a lot of time in understanding the problem we were trying to solve and also trial and error on making the APIs and our website work. Our team was also formed in this hackathon itself, and of 3 time zones, and mostly first time hackers, so we needed to get used to each other's communications style, and also to navigate how a hackathon works.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

By focusing on implementing an MVP, we were able to complete a fully-functional and user-friendly web application by the deadline. We managed to explore many free resources and settled on the best suitable ones. We learnt about HTML, CSS, JS, version control in such a short time. We were also able to build relationships quickly, work well together which is amazing! Project management and teamwork.

What we learned

We learned that it’s best to keep things simple. Initially we envisioned building out a full stack web application using ReactJS, Python, Django, and a database using the skills we learned from the workshop. However, we quickly realized that we needed to first build out a working minimum viable application so we used simple technologies but were able to achieve good results. Built with: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, GitHub, Zenhub, Figma

What's next for MedDevice Search

We would like to find a long-term cloud-based solution for hosting our application, so that patients can continue to access it and utilize its helpful information. We would also like to expand our solution to include medical devices that are of the other clearance process, and display more details about the product and history.