[DataDrivenMD]

As an anesthesiologist and hacker, I love the enthusiasm here. I’m less concerned about the hospital use-case. It would be helpful to crowdsource solutions to address the need for ventilators after patients leave the ICU. Based on current practice patterns, some patients will undergo tracheostomy tube placement, and then need to be discharged to respiratory rehab facilities. We will need to increase capacity in this setting, and I’m not seeing or hearing anyone address this area. If we don’t solve this problem, we will find ourselves with a backlog of patients who could be discharged from the ICU, but with nowhere to go.

[rectang]

Anecdotally:

My mother is a retired RN with an "inactive" license in Washington state. She does elder care as a side gig for individual clients.

She recently had to turn someone down because the patient was intubated; it's not legal for her to care for such a patient. If anything went wrong she could be both at risk of a lawsuit and in trouble with the state for practicing medicine without a license.

(She's also in her seventies herself, putting her in the high-risk category, but that's a different issue.)

I'm at a loss as to how our legal and licensing institutions can be adapted to allow for a quick increase in the number of personnel who can care for intubated patients.

[wool_gather]

Is it not a "simple" matter of the state waiving license requirements like this? I thought I had heard of this being done already.

I.e., either the governor or the legislature says "it's no longer impermissible for RNs with inactive licenses to care for intubated patients". Or even "all inactive licenses shall be considered active on request of the licensee, until DD/MM/YYYY". Fiat, done.

[Scoundreller]

If health care workers start falling ill and going into 14 day quarantines, this will need to happen.

And it would only be a start.

Can also do: if you're currently in a program of studies XYZ and > 75% complete, you can also practice until xx/yy/zzzz and indemnified by government.

[DataDrivenMD]

You raise a related issue, which is critical to address as well. That is, we need people to help manage patients before, during, and after their hospital stay. I’m less concerned about the licensing issues because public health emergency declarations make it possible for state officials to clear the way for someone like your mom.

Where you, and fellow hackers can help, is by offering tech solutions that solve the issue of coordinating/figuring out where your mom’s skills could be most helpful. We will also need to collect information, such as when your mom is available to help. Could be a good time to revisit the concept of an Uber-like platform for healthcare delivery, assuming that it can be up an running in a few days. Hack-a-thon, anyone?

[rectang]

Count me in!

> revisit the concept of an Uber-like platform for healthcare delivery

Where has this been discussed before? There are lots of referral services, some of them charities, some of them private businesses. For example, in Washington state there's the Korean Women's Association: https://www.kwacares.org/

[DataDrivenMD]

Sweet. Looked into the KWA's site, seems like a clear use-case. If we were to break down the build into achievable chunks we may have more success, and have a bigger impact along the way.

There's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available. Trump said Google was building it, but turns out they are weeks away from an MVP that would only cover the SF Bay Area. I propose we start by solving that problem.

Building on this, we can answer the question: what is the scope of the problem? Today, the CDC doesn't have an accurate count of the # of COVID-19 tests that have been performed because they don't have a way to collect that info from the growing number of labs that are performing the tests. Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many people have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times. We could solve this problem by crowdsourcing that information directly from individuals.

Building on this, we need to know where the sickest people are right now, and predict where they could be in the near future. This is crucial information for healthcare providers (like me) and public health officials alike. Without this information in hand, it's virtually impossible to know where to direct resources (like doctors, nurses, ventilators, medical supplies, testing equipment, etc.). We need to be able to track demand AND supply in real-time --> this is the point at which the project starts shaping itself into an Uber-like platform.

Building on this, we could enable individuals to post offers to help and for others to request assistance. This would allow people like your mom to lend a hand where it is a) safe for her and b) most needed.

The ultimate goal would be to build an open-source platform that could be used by communities around the world with little-to-no deployment overhead. Ideally, it would be possible to clone the repo, customize a few parameters, and deploy instances in less than an hour.

I'll flesh this out a bit more, and submit the idea as an Ask HN topic.

[rectang]

> There's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available.

Seems like that could be achieved with a static HTML website, possibly augmented with a REST API.

I doubt that information is changing very quickly. It could theoretically even be committed to a Git repo in a CSV file. However, although that would work for generating a website, it wouldn't be clone-able. So perhaps consider some canonical datastore in the cloud somewhere.

Also: I propose Apache/MIT licensing to minimize the friction of collaboration with both commercial entities and charities.

Technology wise, I don't care: it should just be something mainstream, popular and easy.

> Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many people have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times.

That seems like a harder problem because of patient privacy issues.

[DataDrivenMD]

> That seems like a harder problem because of patient privacy issues.

Agreed, but even a simple honor system would be better than the current situation. Perhaps verified via a simple browser-based cookie?

Separately: just dawned on me that HN has no obvious way for users to communicate directly. Any suggestions on how to share contact info without begging for spam/bots?

[DataDrivenMD]

I posted the call to action here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577611

There was a word limit, so I had to comment on my own post to share full details. Sorry, not sorry HN mods ;-)

[mNovak]

This reminds me of an app a friend of mine made for finding and coordinating volunteers: https://pointapp.org/

It's focused on non-skilled volunteering, but would seem easy enough to add and match qualifiers (e.g. medical skillsets) between organizations and volunteers.