Global Health Records

The Problem it solves :

In the healthcare sector, change is typically implemented slowly. It shows how slowly technology is being adopted that many hospitals still keep their records on paper Interoperability is a significant problem in the healthcare sector. I refer to the sharing, searching, and querying of Health Records as interoperability. Right now, healthcare record management networks have many loopholes in the system.

Also, it becomes almost impossible to keep track of every record, even for individuals and medical organizations. The lack of transparency also leads to cost and friction to shift between medical or-ganizations according to the patient's will, which ultimately dilutes the trust in this network.

A further limitation that the existing system has is the case of medical emergencies such as road accidents. In such cases, since enough medical information is unavailable on the spot.

The four major stumbling blocks in interoperability are:

1. Patient Record Tracking: Many of us have faced a problem, when we relocate to a new place, we need to keep the records with us and show these records to the next doctor we visit.

2. Mismatching Records: Patient misidentification occurs when a healthcare provider mixes up the medical records of different patients. This happens when the patients share similar characteristics – name, date of birth, and medical history, are just a few examples.

3. Information Transparency: Hospitals suppress information because they don't want to lose patients, which is a very simple explanation. By limiting access to patient data, they thereby make a move extremely inconvenient.

4. Access in case of Emergency: when a doctor overrides them at the same instant date, doctor-ID and patient Aadhaar are cap-tured, and this data can be recollected if the patient finds that his data was accessed without their permission.
   

The detailed problem and solution statement is in the notion file

• Establishing a database and API endpoint.

Initially, we decided to keep the database on IPFS and host our backend on Django. The problem with IPFS storage was that IPFS had a long latency in data retrieval. As our application mainly deals with file storage and retrieval, requesting multiple files at once on IPFS cause a huge delay, and we cannot have that on our application. The solution to this was using a local file storage system for file handling, which would defeat the purpose of having a fast-access decentralized file storage system.
We came around Cartesi during the workshop period and were impressed by its capabilities, Cartesi promised faster-decentralized file storage and API hosting solution, So we finally decided to build our backend on Cartesi System. Building with Cartesi had its problems. Lacking proper documentation and a variety of pre-built applications, we encountered multiple problems in setting up and running the system. With the support of the present supporting staff, we resolved many of our errors.

• Adding push notifications to our App As per a safety protocol, we needed to notify the user every time a modification was made to their account, like a prescription being uploaded or a doctor being added to his profile. As the backed end was hosted on Cartesi, we faced the limitation of the internet's unavailability and inability to use push protocol efficiently. We could not get around this problem because of the lack of examples using Cartesi and Push Protocol. Rather we found a way around to run this App locally with push protocol.