CoronaTracker

The background:
When the Coronavirus outbreak shut down Northern Italy, I found myself not finding any difference between the containment efforts of the USA and Italy. It was only a matter of time, perhaps two to three weeks before New York closed down.

Instead of being paranoid about the situation, I decided to start to do something about it. Like most, I wouldn't be going anywhere anytime soon.

As the organizer of New York Health Artificial Intelligence Society and NYC Blockchain Devs, I had a significant enough network to pull together a great team and work on something interesting.

The problem:
Previously, a team and I had to create a white paper around using blockchains protocols as a way to decentralize vaccination records. I realized that people needed a way to control their medical data in a way that was interoperable, decentralized and controlled by the user.

Patient control of data, interoperability, and decentralization is vital to improving healthcare. Without it, costs rise, communication between providers break down, the possibility of harm increases, innovation reduced, and security decreases via centralization.

Healthcare systems are already strained during normal times. During a pandemic, the system breaks down.

The method:
I posted a Hackathon on both meetups, and a back end developer and designer came through to design something. Within the end the weekend we had mockups, setting up tieback end and were recruiting developers.

After a few days, via the NYHAIS network, we honed down our MVP with user interviews from an emergency room doctor, a pulmonary critical care doctor, and a systems architect for enterprise and medical offices.

The MVP:
Our user interviews honed down our MVP, target audience, and presented with us the right initial features. Our project became an open-source project with an excellent white paper and designs. Now it was time to build.

What did I learn?
People will step up and help if you ask. Having a network helps. People are generally agreeable.

Now we have a repo:
https://github.com/COVID-19-electronic-health-system/Corona-tracker/