Wait State

Meet the Team!

Problem and Solution

An issue with emergencies are the unknown availability of hospitals near them. Especially during this time of covid where ER wait times have been the highest, it would be crucial for a person to know if a hospital can assist them in time of emergency. WaitState is our solution, an application meant for hospital emergency rooms to relay wait time for patients. Patients will be able to search for hospitals near them to see which ones have the shortest total wait time. Hopsitals can create temporary accounts for their patients and edit the average wait time per person. From their temporary account, patients can check their time, and also their number in the queue. WaitState could be an impactful addition that hospitals can incorporate to benefit their patients.

Responsibilities

For WaitState I was issued tasks to create and manage the collections for patients and hospitals. I added patients as a role and worked with another team member to add patients into our Mongo database. I was also tasked to display the patients, respectively to a hospital, as well as a function to delete patients from the database. With deleting patients, the queue position of the other users also had to change. The deleting function had some issues, so I worked with a couple team members to resolve them.

Obstacles

We had many obstacles to overcome during this hackathon. The time limit of 5 days emphasized the amount of communication and coordination we would need during this event. Designing our application we met with each other every day creating and discussing issues we would need to accomplish by certain days. With this time crunch we also had to be vocal with the things that we needed help with to ensure other functions could be completed in time. Our team was very supportive of each other which made it easy for all of us to reach out. A couple issues that we ran into during the creation of WaitState was the delete function, while the function worked, Meteor didn’t allow the deletion of things in a collection so we were able to found a way to give those permissions Another big issue was deployment. Besides the errors of deploying our application, when using our hospital directory we realized that our loading time was too large due to our hospital collection. Our Meteor subscriptions were not as optimized as they could be. There were also a few other smaller roadblocks, but through our teamwork we were able to find our solutions and workarounds.

Gained Experience

This was the first time I had worked on a project with a time crunch like this. I am very proud of our team’s communication and support, without it I am sure we would not have been able to complete what we were set out to do. Advice given by the officials, and our Professor provided insight for what we could do better in our next hackathon. While our functionality had a solid foundation, we had some design flaws. A focus on functionality and less on design leaves something lacking. I believe we can show the value of our ideas and entice the interest of our audience better next time around.

Github Page and README: WaitState GitHub Dev Page

Application: Wait State App