Ask HN: Can we build an open source platform that helps COVID-19 patients?

14 points by DataDrivenMD 6 years ago | 3 comments

Many communities around the world are finding themselves in dire need of trained medical professionals and first-responders to deal with an influx of critically ill COVID-19 patients. Other areas need volunteers to work at food banks and shelters.

The demand for resources will wax-and-wane as local outbreaks are identified and then addressed. The supply of resources will likewise be dynamic. For example, there are many retired, semi-retired, and part-time doctors, nurses, and EMT staff who are able and willing to help. There’s currently no way for people to know where or when they are needed. The HN community can help.

The mission would be to build an open-source platform QUICKLY that could be used by communities around the world with little-to-no deployment overhead. If successful, the final product makes it possible for community leaders to partner with 1-2 developers that would clone the repo, customize a few parameters, and deploy instances in less than an hour.

I am a physician and an engineer with product development and full-stack experience, but I can’t do it alone. Any help is appreciated, particularly with the following immediate needs:

- Experienced PM who can flesh out the specs further and assume ownership of the roadmap. This would free me to focus my efforts on coordinating with public health officials, healthcare providers, and (if needed) to help care for patients on the front lines.

- DevSecOps lead with open-source experience and a reputation for QUICKLY building consensus involving key technical decisions. This would allow me to focus my technical contributions to those involving clinical data pipelines.

- Open-source community manager who would own all the engineering components that are not directly part of the product - this includes the project landing page, community rules, and offering assistance/guidance to developers around the world who are looking to deploy the platform.

Anybody interested in helping out?

rectang 6 years ago |

To offer a little feedback: Focusing on an immediate deliverable that solves a finite problem was good, but I think the proposal was structured in such a way that it asked for too much commitment too fast.

A "hackathon" has a short time horizon. At the end of the hackathon you'd have some idea as to whether or not you'd want to continue, regardless of whether the goals of the hackathon had been achieved. Give people a chance to try out contributing in small amounts, and to evaluate whether they want to continue contributing.

DataDrivenMD 6 years ago | |

Well put. We’re working on the testing site locator right now. We’ve gathered contact info for 3500+ public health agencies, plus starting to add info for urgent care facilities, health systems, community hospitals, and academic health centers. We’ve got CIOs and CMIOs from across the country helping us gather the data we need. The goal is simply to make it easy for people to get tested.

Would be great to have your help. Send me an email if you’d like to learn more (see my profile)

DataDrivenMD 6 years ago |

If we break down the challenge, we can start having an immediate impact. Here’s how:

- Now: there's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available. Trump recently said that Google was working on it, but it turns out not to be the case (they are weeks away from an MVP that would only cover the SF Bay Area). I propose we start by solving this problem.

- Next: What is the scope of COVID-19 infection? Today, the CDC doesn't have an accurate count of the # of COVID-19 tests that have been performed because they don't have a way to collect that info from the growing number of labs that are performing the tests. Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many people have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times. We could solve this problem by crowdsourcing that information directly from individuals.

- Next +1: We need to know where the sickest people are right now, and predict where they could be in the near future. This is crucial information for healthcare providers (like me) and public health officials alike. Without this information in hand, it's virtually impossible to know where to direct resources (like doctors, nurses, ventilators, medical supplies, testing equipment, etc.). We need to be able to track demand AND supply in real-time --> this is the point at which the project starts shaping itself into an Uber-like platform.

- Next +2: Enable individuals to post offers to help and for others to request assistance. This would enable individuals with medical training to help meet the need. It would also enable everyone to help in other ways, like delivering food for the elderly.