Mednote: a note-taking app that builds a medical ontology while you use it

Introduction

Mednote is a lightweight medical note-taking app that builds a medical ontology while you use it. I built this and used it during medical school when trying to organize the vast differentials and arrays of supporting evidence for different diagnoses.

This web-based app has an interface similar to Evernote. Users can create a page to take notes on a particular concept, like 'chest pain'. Within the body of the text, users denote relationships with other medical terms, which gets extracted from the text and placed into the sidebar. As you build pages and connections, linkages develop, allowing you to navigate back and forth between concepts. On the 'chest pain' page, as an emergent property, you can see the different causes, and recommendations on which examinations or tests to run to differentiate them.

Source code

Open source

https://bitbucket.org/davehdo/mednote2

Technologies

Ruby on Rails

The index of terms

The chest pain page

The differential diagnosis for chest pain is inferred from the body of the text

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Agent - EMR data straight to your phone

Introduction

Agent is a project I am leading at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Healthcare providers who directly interact with patients can use this app to receive up-to-the-minute results through Push Notifications. 

Aside from streamlining workflow, the Agent platform offers the ability to improve care by delivering targeted notifications based on data. Interventions that would have previously required extensive IT resources to build can now be implemented and tested in a week's time.

Examples of how this can be applied:

• Antibiotics medications often expire without provider awareness, leading to missed doses. Agent alerts providers when it's time to renew a medication.
• Previously there was no automated notification for when patients arrive on the floor. Agent ensure providers are aware so patients can be seen immediately.

The possibilities are limitless. The goal of Agent is to create an environment where people can design, test, and iterate on process improvements. This is where Agile Development meets medicine. 

Agent Landing Page

We needed a way to communicate to administrators the benefits of the new technology to gain support. We also needed a way to onboard beta testers with email confirmation and a survey.

Components

Blog

Multistep sign up process with email confirmation, survey

Technologies

Ruby on Rails
simple-rss gem
CSS
jQuery

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