User Need
The field of medicine is vast with an abundance of information associated with diagnosis and treatments of various diseases and illnesses. Resident physicians, being recent medical school graduates have a challenge to apply their learned knowledge in a clinical setting. Upon seeing a patient with a particular ailment, a resident may need to look up treatment details in a large pool of resources which takes time and energy. The goal of this project was to make intricate details regarding treatments for illnesses more efficiently accessible to physicians.
Proposed Solution
The proposed solution was a note taking mobile application specifically catered towards a physician. Residents could make notes regarding various illnesses they treated the first time. They could then reuse the recorded details for future encounters. As treatments for illnesses change, the notes can be updated. The application would also have a social aspect where physicians could follow their colleagues and have access to their notes.
Implementation
Resident Handbook was built using Ruby on Rails and Bootstrap. I’ve always wanted to build a web application from the ground up. Looking into the tools that I would need to accomplish this I learned about Ruby on Rails. It’s a web application framework with the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern at its core. Developers can quickly spin-up default structures for databases, web services and webpages. The most useful and hands-on resource that helped me grasp Ruby on Rails core concepts was Micheal Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorials – Learn Web Development with Rails. I would highly recommend this book to those that would like to learn Rails in a very applied way. Along the way I also dabbled with Bootstrap which which is a well known HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive mobile first applications.
Design Details
The workflow begins with the user signing up for the application on the main page of the application. Once their account is setup they can begin creating new notes by clicking “New Note” on their dashboard. On the “New Note” page key field titles are filled in which the user can modify if desired. They can also add additional desired fields. Once the note is created it is organized in alphabetical order according to main category in a accordion style layout, allowing the user to quickly navigate to the appropriate treatment.
Sign up page.
User dashboard.
New note page.
Ability to add additional fields to a note.
New note created.
Users can choose to follow others to obtain access to to their notes. The users page lists all users in the social network. Users can go to another’s profile and decide to follow or unfollow them.
List of all users in site.
Ability to see followed user’s notes.
Unfollow user by going to their profile.
Click “Follow” to view user notes in own profile.
Seeing second user’s notes in profile.
The application is responsive and is functional on various device sizes.
User Testing
I have access to a pool of resident physicians in a local Family Medicine residency program which I can use to assess the effectiveness of this tool. User testing is to be conducted in the near future!