Project: Develop an Android mobile application to show patient friendly costs of care

Summary Recent changes in Medicare’s payment policies under the inpatient prospective payment system (PPS) and the long-term care hospital PPS required that the CDM be made available in a machine-readable format by January 1, 2019 . These formats are in XML or CSV and while machine readable do not make sense for a patient who is comparing the prices. Your task this year (should you accept it ) is to create an Android mobile application that has the following functionality

  1. Allows search based on user location of the nearest hospital - and filter the charges for a specific procedure. For example if I wanted a tooth extraction in the Indiana area, I would use your application and search for the nearest hospitals and filter by costs of the procedure to be performed

  2. To accurately get the data to populate your mobile application , you will need to find a way to search for the charge data across multiple hospitals, and to keep the links (refreshing the pages to ensure that the links are uptodate )

  3. Your backend application should refresh every night to ensure up to date information. The backend should be RESTFUL to allow for future development across multiple platforms

Mentors : @sunbiz @judywawira @muarachmann

Task Prerequisite: A prototype mobile application pinging any hospital in the US and fetching the data required and showing it on a mobile application

Bonus points : Designing and developing a web facing prototype and a mobile application that can run on windows and iPhone

Skills: Mobile development - (Android , possible iOS/ windows development) , Web development , Web scraping

Resources: This is an interesting paper to educate you on the background of publishing for costs of care - https://medinform.jmir.org/2020/2/e14436/

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Hello mentors, is it possible to work only on a particular skill like Android? Actually i am interested in this project idea and i would like to work with your organization on the Android domain.

Hi @Devyank_Shaw welcome to LH, the project is mainly android but we would love an app that can work on windows/IOS too as seen in the bonus sections. We require you complete the pre-requisite task too as a POC. You can do that as a repo on your github and submit the link here.

Hi @mua_rachmann Can’t get POC? And what are the types of data of the hospital do i need to fetch and display it on the mobile application?

Hello mentors. The projects suggests developing a prototype of the application pinging any hospital in US. Do the hospitals have the required dataset which I can fetch though an API?

POC: Proof of Concept @Devyank_Shaw

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Hello mentors. I am Darshpreet Singh ,I am interested in this project. Can you provide us some sample APIs?

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Hello Mentors , I am Arihant Jain , 3rd year CSE undergraduate student at Manipal Institute of Technology , India. I have been doing Flutter and Android Development for 2 years. I am also a core committee member of the Android Application Team of my cultural fest. This project will help me provide an opportunity to improve my skills and use it for the benefit of people. Looking forward to learning from the community. May i know if developing applications in cross platform framework like Flutter will be accepted ?

Hi mentors, i have been working with native android development for 4 years, I am a 3rd year CSE engineering student. I have also worked on other NGO android applications for Enactus Organization.

The project is very interesting and i would like to work and contribute in the same.

Only doubt i have is the api which will be provided for information on each hospital. Can you please elaborate on where can we get such APIs for US hospitals?

Project Links

Hi @ParichayDidwania and everyone else … GSoC is mostly about you being able to carry on with the tasks given as compared to GCI, make use of every information given to you and also carry out sufficient research . If you notice, there is a skill needed which is that of web scrapping, You will have to try to research more on how to get CDM for some hospitals.

Maybe this could help or be an example https://www.pennmedicine.org/for-patients-and-visitors/patient-information/insurance-and-billing/financial-transparency/financial-transparency-for-penn-presbyterian-medical-center

@muarachmann Thank you for clarifying.

But do we need to manually update the database everytime by downloading CDM of each Hospital ,saving it in database and then making Rest API??

Okay , now I got a way to do with API. I will fetch CDM of Hospitals in US. I will try to do it using React Native so that we can get app for Android,IOS,Website together. I will share my idea in Proposal soon. But we still need to manually update in database if prices are changed. I will try to cover as many hospital as I can but still all hospitals can’t be covered.

How many Hospitals do I need to cover as there are more than 6000 Hospitals in US Region,I can’t scrap data of all??

Mentors Please Reply.

This project seem to be interesting to work on

Ideally as many as possible…probably can pull from a dataset to get an idea.

With regards to updating, you can do a crowdsourcing method.

https://healthcostinstitute.org/data

Hi everyone, my name is Adit Kotwal and I am a final year computer engineering student from Mumbai. This projects piqued my interest and I also have experience working on Web and Android Development in the past. I will start implementing and submit it on completion for your feedback. Thank you !

So we need to create RESTful API that scrap data server side and update database and a mobile application that fetches the data and shows to the user. mentors @sunbiz @ judywawira @muarachmann, please correct me if I am wrong
I developed some applications similar to that in flutter which runs on both android and ios now flutter also supporting web and desktop I think flutter is the best option for development. May i use flutter for development if got selected?

Can we submit proposal before 16 march here for any suggestions to improve it?

Not on the GSoC website, but you can certainly start now. One thing: it doesn’t matter when you submit them, what matters is the quality of your plan.

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