MEDuele

2011-10-12

Me and my friends Steph, Will and Patrick built a multilingual nursing hotline and website, MEDuele, for the Cal Health Data Hackathon. We came up with the idea from Patrick's experience volunteering in a free South Bay medical clinic. Patrick, being the Renaissance man that he is, worked as a translator for patients speaking Mandarin and Spanish. He noticed the clinic was always really busy but didn't have enough resources to see that many patients. We thought of MEDuele as a proof-of-concept triaging system.

Patients could call the MEDuele hotline and essentially "leave a message after the beep" describing their ailments. To triage these patients, two teams of people would use the MEDuele webapp -- the first would simply translate and transcribe the message when the caller spoke a language other than English. The second group, one with more medical expertise, would then recommend a course of action. And the group of translators could then call the patient back with recommendations. A screenshot of the webapp is below:

Of course there would be a lot of valid concerns around a patient's private information -- thankfully this was just a hackathon / proof of concept, and we didn't have to delve into that. But we did get some good feedback from the experts on the judging panel, they found it interesting and encouraged us to pursue it as a company.

The source for the site is on github and there's a short demo video of the site in action here on youtube. (Alas, I recently let go of the callmeduele.org domain.)