Project: Develop a mobile application to help provide financial navigation to patients

Background

Receiving care is expensive, and hence hospitals employ people to help patients get the financial help they need. Financial navigation programs differ from more limited financial counseling or assistance programs by proactively reaching out to all cancer patients to assess their needs for services and working closely with the patient, the care team, and administrative staff to develop and carry out a plan that alleviates the financial burdens of undergoing cancer treatment. Program representatives recommend being as proactive as possible by identifying potential clients early on and even meeting with all new cancer patients to assess their likelihood for needing support

Though most cancer programs offer some form of financial counseling or assistance, they provide a limited scope of services to a limited population. Assistance may be focused on one specific episode of care rather than on the patient’s overall planned treatment regimen. This is a good reference article on financial program navigation - https://www.michigancancer.org/PDFs/Publications_Products/MCCExclusiveProd/FinancialNavigationReport_FinalAccessible2018.pdf

Task/Project Your task is to develop a mobile application with a web based administration backend that allows financial navigators manage clients receiving financial advice. Please review this document of a similar application for training that we have developed for training midwives in neonatal resuscitation - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333305253_Development_of_an_Innovative_Mobile_Phone-Based_Newborn_Care_Training_Application

Your application should

  • Allow patient enrollment - using FHIR and using plain registration
  • Allow rapid deployment of surveys int he admin section and their subsequent completion (This should include the COmprehensive Score for financial Toxicity survey or The National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s (NCCN) distress management tool.
  • Integrate in a video chat service - https://marketplace.zoom.us/docs/api-reference/zoom-api
  • Provide SMS functionality
  • Provide an option to upload educational content
  • Provide an admin view to manage all the clients with decision support

Task Prerequisite: Enroll a patient using DHIS2 Web API into the mHBS tracker application and show the patient into DHIS 2. The code to do this is available here: https://github.com/iupui-soic/mHBS_tracker

Bonus points Linkage with financial programs including

  1. Vivor’s PayRx Navigator (vivor.com), an online tool that identifies foundations from which patients may be eligible to receive assistance. The tool can also alert navigators when a foundation begins accepting new assistance applications, so they do not have to continuously monitor the program ’ s status.
  2. Tailor Med (tailormed.com)
  3. Assist Point (assistpoint.com)

Skills: Android, Web development

Mentors: @judywawira @sunbiz

1 Like

Hello! @judywawira This project seems both challenging as well as interesting! I really like the motivation behind the idea of this project. I’ve read the whole text above and I have some doubts.

  1. Can you please explain the following? What exactly do we have to implement in below? Will an online database and database management tool (example: MongoDB/Firebase) satisfy the needs?
  1. I need a little more explanation on surveys that are to be conducted on the application.

Hello @judywawira @sunbiz, the idea is amazing and alot relatable, I’ve been doing a project on similar lines in India as a project in my dual degree , economics + computer science at BITS Pilani, India. I keenly want to work on this project . I am comfortable both with java/kotlin development and flutter hybrid application development.

  1. What do you suggest , should this application be developed in native android or flutter? And
  2. How should I start contributing ? Should we start a new project or Is there any existing repo?

Thank You

@strongrunner, We would like to use something that is more common among developers. I suggest using Cordova and any web UI framework. Flutter is interesting, but it is based on Dart, which has some learning curve and not the most popular.

Also, being able to publish an iOS version later would be welcome by the users who might also have Apple phones. We would like to build it similar to the mHBS Trainer app that is linked in the description. So being able to clone, build and test that should be introductory work and then removing something like the PIN page, and adding some web service calls to the DHIS2 tracker Web API would be a good start, before the application period.

1 Like

Hello mentors,I am Darshpreet Singh currently doing BTech in Computer Science & Engineering ,I would like to work on this project,I will make both Android application and web based administration.

Can I use Android Development with Kotlin and if you need IOS app I can use Swift for it?

So, @sunbiz what do you suggest , would flutter be a better choice for the project on developing mobile application to show patient friendly costs of care?As it requires a hybrid application.

@sunbiz Whom to contact regarding “mHBS Trainer app”. The link mentioned in the github is outdated. I beleive the app was built using framework7 and needs to run on Cordova. I’m facing issues in setting up the project to see and test the app.

What in the link outdated? I wrote above that I suggest to use Cordova and any web UI framework. Framework7 is a fairly fine web UI framework that was used in mHBS training app

1 Like

@sunbiz @judywawira Hi, my name is Satyam Sheel, and i have looked at the documents related to this project, and i was thinking of using java to build the required app. I need a little more clarity about the prerequisite task that has been given:- Should i make, an app demonstrating the given task or provide an idea in written how will i approach this task. ThankYou.

@SatyamSheel Yes, please do so, and share the link to your repo with the code, because that will help us in reviewing your application and letting us know about your coding style etc.

Your proposal is your project plan. See Making a great GSOC proposal - Example

@judywawira @sunbiz The training app mentioned in the link has an option “mHBS Tracker” in the side navigation bar, which is not responsive. So clicking it, should it enroll the user (patient ) and open the mHBS tracker application?. But the tracker application needs a seperate set of login credentials (server_url, username, password) to use. I just wanted to confirm as to what was asked.

@r0bby @judywawira Here is the link to my repo performing the prerequisite task https://github.com/satyamsheel/dhis2/tree/master. This app not perfect yet as there are few issues that i need to solve yet but as told by @sunbiz This will help you to evaluate my coding style and also i will be constantly making changes to the app to make it more stable…Since we dont have much time left before starting of the proposal period so i am sharing the repo and i will be looking forward to your valuable feedback and also valuable suggestions as to what can be improved and if i was on the right track or not. I have used the DHIS2 sdk for building the app and have followed all the steps mentioned in the documentation. For refining of my code i studied the full codebase of DHIS2 skeleton app and took help from it for implementing Rxjava and i have also studied the mHBS tracker app. I am also currently working on an app to implement the video calling feature using the ZOOM api.The repo to which i will be sharing soon. Thankyou

@r0bby @sunbiz @judywawira I have shared the draft proposal on the official GSoC site. Looking forward to your valuable feedback.

Hello, My name is Akhil Kumar and I am a 2nd-year BTech student at U.i.E.T, M.D.U.

My technical knowledge includes flutter, dart, python,Html, CSS, Mysql,data structures . My projects includes two applications based on flutter which are soon to be published on appstore and playstore as well, they will be used by real industries as they were built on demand, and some other applications that i made during learning fluter, i have been working on flutter since 1 year now.

I am very much interested to participate in GSoC 2020. The main reason for doing GSoC is to get exposure to the developer’s world and to work with new people.

I am looking forward to work under LibreHealth and I loved the project ideas list, especially the ‘Mobile application to help provide financial navigation to patients’ and i am confident that i can work on that as I have been working on such real time project and also have an idea too on that which i will submit soon as a proposal.

Thanks and Regards,

Akhil Kumar

Although i would like to know that can i work on flutter technology for making mobile applications as it will support both Android and IOS platform or is kotlin must?

@Darshpreet2000 could you share a Google Doc and not a PDF please? Your final proposal will be converted to a PDF when you finalize it.

Try to make your proposal no more than 15 pages. I think you can express yourself in that length.

Okay Sure, I am finalising my draft proposal will share with you soon today

Don’t finalize it until we say it’s okay to do so! Neither @muarachmann nor myself will be mentors on this project. We are just providing you with feedback on what we need to see in proposals.

I have written in 18 Pages and have added link to details.

If you want to know details, you can click on it, it will open another document