Dialysis Companion: Dialysis Center Locator
What is It?
Dialysis Companion is a prototype mobile application that allows patients to make the best decisions about dialysis treatment based on factors such as quality measures, location, transportation options, and user-generated ratings. Dialysis Companion showcases a powerful feature that allows users to repeatedly rate dialysis centers and thus provide direct feedback about the centers to the entire dialysis community. In this way, users of Dialysis Companion are consistently expanding and improving the available information about clinics and facilities around the country. Dialysis Companion creates a positive feedback loop for the community, first allowing patients to make informed decisions about their care, and then offering them a channel to offer feedback to others looking to make similar choices.
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(Note: Dialysis Companion works best on an iPhone or iPodTouch.)
What Are Some Key Features of This App?
- Patients can identify all dialysis facilities within a certain distance from their homes.
- Patients can compare publicly available key quality measures for each facility.
- Patents can filter facilities displayed based on services offered (e.g. in-center peritoneal dialysis, in-center hemodialysis).
- Patients can rate dialysis facilities in categories such as chair comfort, televisions, cleanliness, and staff helpfulness.
- Patients can store information in a treatment log about their experiences in the dialysis center.
Who's Building It?
Oak Grove Technologies has teamed with Modo Labs to design and develop this application. Oak Grove is a multimedia company that specializes in making training fun and interactive. Our recent project, "In Sue Lin's World," won the Most Creative Idea Award in the Diabetes Mine competition. Modo Labs builds mobile applications for the Mobile Web, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms using a proprietary, open source, mobile framework. It makes its framework available to developers and organizations that want to use mobile in positive, life-changing ways. Modo Lab clients include Harvard and MIT, and it is rapidly expanding into the government space. Also on our team is Lou Lamoureux, longtime kidney patient and activist. Lou has brought considerable attention to the needs of kidney patients through his athletic endeavours and his blog TransplantAthlete.
Why Are You Building It?
We want to make life better for people with chronic health conditions and empower patients to take control of their health care. With this in mind, we entered the Health 2.0 Developers Challenge: "Consumer Apps to Visualize Health Care Quality Measures." The aim of this competition is to develop a visually interesting and useful prototype app that pulls from at least one Medicare dataset. Currently, this information is available to the public on the Resource page of the Medicare website, but is not easily accessed.
How Can I Learn More?
Contact us directly for more information on this application as well as other health care applications and training that we're working on.
