Sup Doc

Inspiration

As a kid, I always hated going to the doctors. Whether I needed antibiotics to recover from a nasty cold, or a flu shot, going to the doctor's is just a huge pain. That stress followed me later in life, and even today I don't feel comfortable talking to my doctor about personal information, potential concerns, or even go to my recommended checkups. This problem goes beyond just my own personal experiences. According to the CDC, 16.8% of adults haven't seen a health care professional in the last year. That's more than 1 out of 6 individuals, one in six who are at risk to a multitude of curable diseases that could all be solved if they simply talked to their doctor. I can't blame them, but if there was a way to break the communication barrier between doctor to patient, a way that allows people to get early care, for doctors to intelligently learn more about their patients habits without the embarrassment, nervousness, or fear of going to the doctors, then that should be something we undeniably pursue.

We grew our app off of that idea, "How can we make communicating with your doctor fun, pleasant, satisfying?" It's one of the world's biggest advertising challenges, and Sup Doc was our attempt to solve it.

What it does

We wanted to create a system that rewards constant communications with your doctor - a system that helps facilitate a relationship with your physician. Conceptually our plan was to give patients and doctors access to information about each other, a way to sort of pave a 2 way street of communication. By offering entertainment rewards for constant communication we hoped to promote a friendly type of communication with your doctor. Furthermore, our app planned to prompt users with daily questions that would prompt users to think about their health, and give them a space to raise any potential concerns. Those answers would be forwarded to their doctor's wall, allowing the doctor to easily browse through all of his patient's concerns.

Of course apps like this ride entirely on the ease of use, efficiency of the system, and quality feeling of the website, so it was also vital that our app looked good along the way.

How we built it

Sup Doc for the most part remains unfinished.

Sup Doc was built using angularjs, firebase, materializecss, html, and JQuery. Angular, firebase and materialize were entirely new web technologies for us, but as a result we learned a lot from this hackathon and will definitely be able to use these new skills in future hacks.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we faced came mostly from learning new web technologies, the use of angular and firebase can lead to well made and quick applications, however, we were both unused to both pieces of tech, and there was considerable overhead when it came to learning both of them.

In terms of health tech, we were able to talk to a lot of cool people and bounce ideas about improvements that can be made to the industry. We hope that some of these future ideas result in some cool apps down the line that really help to make a difference.

What we learned

Outside of the importance of sleep, we learned how to make the basic implementation of angular, firebase, and materialize, and how all these web technologies interacted with one another.

What's next for Sup Doc

Currently, Sup Doc will most likely remain unfinished, the basic implementation of the app is so far from completion that it makes little sense to continue with the original product in mind. Though our idea was solid for a hackathon, it would be prudent to really explore more deeply into the health tech industry to find or create an application that could really be used to fill a gap in public health.

Built With

• angular.js
• angularfire
• firebase
• html5
• javascript
• jquery
• materialize