Sahay
Coming together, to help one another.
The problem Sahay solves
A product to help humanity, and India as a country, especially during the novel COVID-19 stricken times, by consolidating the health care system and all different medical facilities onto one platform, thus keeping hospitals in a functional state. Founded in 2022, Sahay started life as a way to change the way the healthcare system works.
On average, hospitals spent a combined total of $36 billion on medical and surgical supplies in 2018 (much more after COVID-19 now) — with an average of $11.9 million per hospital on buying equipment and medicines through sellers who may vary prices from hospital to hospital, in order of profit.
Sahay makes a way to not only standardize this process, but in cases of hospitals and providers donating or giving other places their equipment, it saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not only the Hospitals, but the masses who are having to spend all of their savings in case of COVID treatment, will be charged standard prices, regardless of their location in India, and this will help them and their families to survive.
Essentially, we provide hospitals with a platform to display all of their resources and their staff, to keep them in check. It also gives you information about all other hospitals, and their capacities, in a certain radius. Using this information, hospitals can place requests - and their level of urgency - for any commodities or capacity. Thus working together, and pitching in their resources, all our medical faculties will be able to manage the huge influx of patients and lack of equipment without worry.
These resources once shared, the transfer of supplies is validated with the use of blockchain technology.
Our company believes that in these unprecedented times, the benefit of humanity should come before any kind of personal gain. Hospitals can help others and benefit from others' help.
Challenges we ran into
Our main objective with the product was to make it as simple as possible for anyone to use anywhere in the hospital so that everything is connected and up to date. We had to make sure data updates in real-time as people use the app simultaneously.
Research: We worked a lot on the research aspect of this project, making sure it would be more than viable in the real world scenario, and to make sure that everything about the product was feasible. After studying other platforms, we sought to ensure by testing and planning that the user-flow brought real virtue to our promise of a simple, efficient application.
We also had to make sure our product is compatible with every sort of device being used in a hospital, so we decided it'd be best to build a web application as well as an application for mobiles and tablets. The biggest problem we faced with this was integrating them in a way so that users can log into any platform using the same credentials and the data still updates in real-time between these platforms. We implemented a dynamic sort of system which is a mix of firebase authentication and a custom backend API built with Node. This tight integration was one of the biggest challenges we faced for authentication and data storage.
Also, storing images onto Blockchain was something we discovered to be the way harder than it looks like and was seemingly impossible to figure out within a few hours. We hence decided to work with strings instead. The way to do it is to store it off the chain, unless you use IPFS.