CareReach

Overview

CareReach was launched out of the Healthcare Innovation challenge. Over the course of 24 hours, our team identified key challenges at UChicago Medicine and developed an initial technology prototype.

The core focus was on “reactive care” — which results in unnecessary hospital readmissions and minimal patient engagement following discharge. With this in mind, we identified our first use case: medication adherence for diabetes patients.

After interviewing patients and providers, we sketched the initial patient journey. This journey fed the core inputs for our proactive outreach solution.

Hackathon Prototype

CareReach is a text-based chatbot that periodically checks in with patients. Our prototype illustrates the value of an intuitive user interface for patients to receive reminders, input symptoms, and access additional care support.

Every few days, CareReach checks in with a diabetes patient to ensure that they have picked up their medication and are not having adverse side effects while taking their medication.

Solution Architecture

Under the hood, CareReach is powered by Dialogflow — Google’s Natural Language Understanding engine — to respond to user inputs. This allows the back-end service to be agnostic to a particular front-end interaction, easily navigating between SMS or voice interactions (e.g. Google Home).

Twilio powers the output to SMS and a Flask application using Python Anywhere houses application logic and scheduling workflows.

Future Focus

After winning the UChicago Innovation challenge, we used our learnings to collaborate more closely with UChicago Medicine. In particular, our prototype laid the foundation as part of Socium Health.