Summary
A hackathon project that lets patients log symptoms as they appear and gives their family doctor a clear report before an online consultation.
Symptogram is a clinical decision support tool we built for The Grand Nordic Health Hackathon. The idea is simple: help patients keep track of their symptoms over time, and give their family doctor a clear, structured picture before an online consultation. I worked on it together with Indrit Kello, who started the project.
The challenge
When life is busy, it is easy to ignore small symptoms as they start to show up. By the time you see a doctor, you have forgotten when things started or how they changed. Family doctors then spend a lot of their limited time just working out what the patient is trying to describe.
For some patients the problem is bigger. People with chronic conditions or movement disorders often have to travel to the clinic again and again for follow-ups that could just as well happen remotely.
Our approach
Symptogram lets you log symptoms the moment you notice them. Everything you log stays private until you choose to share it with your family doctor. The doctor can then look through your symptom history and reply with advice directly in the app.
A few decisions shaped the concept:
- A fixed vocabulary instead of free text. Users pick from more than 400 symptoms, so the data is consistent and easy for a doctor to read.
- Standard medical codes. Each symptom is mapped to a UMLS code, so Symptogram can fit into the tools doctors already use instead of becoming another silo.
- Support for chronic conditions. Patients can share measurements like blood pressure and blood sugar, or daily progress for conditions such as kidney disease, multiple sclerosis and depression.
- Smarter reports. By looking at correlations between symptoms and diseases, the platform can give doctors recommendations alongside the patient's history.
We also looked at who could bring it to patients. Besides individual users, health insurance companies could offer Symptogram as part of a package, and employers could offer it as an employee benefit.
The result
We submitted Symptogram as our project at The Grand Nordic Health Hackathon. The code is open source and available on GitHub.
