Care Path

Inspiration

Care Path was inspired by real, everyday healthcare challenges in Nigeria and similar low-resource environments.
Fake drugs continue to circulate widely, emergency situations are often worsened by uncertainty about where to go, and hospitals struggle with overcrowding and long, unstructured queues.

What stood out was that these problems are deeply connected, they affect the same people, at the same moments, often with serious consequences.

Care Path was born from the idea that accessing safe drugs, finding urgent care, and navigating hospitals should follow one clear, reliable path.

What it does

Care Path is an integrated healthcare access platform designed to support SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being by combining three critical features:

• Drug Authenticity Verification — helping users identify fake or expired drugs before consumption.
• Emergency Care Mapping — enabling users to quickly locate nearby hospitals, pharmacies, and emergency centers.
• Smart Hospital Queue Management — reducing overcrowding by allowing patients to join queues remotely.

By unifying these tools, Care Path focuses on prevention, speed, and efficiency across the healthcare journey.

How we built it

Hospital Finder Implemented an interactive hospital locator using OpenStreetMap and React Leaflet, displaying nearby hospitals based on the user’s current location with real-time map rendering. Queue Manager Built a real-time hospital queue management system by integrating backend APIs, designing responsive queue cards with React and Tailwind CSS, and enabling live updates using WebSockets. Drug Authentication & Validation Designed and developed a drug authentication interface using React and Tailwind CSS, integrating AI-powered APIs to validate drug authenticity and suitability based on uploaded images and patient symptoms.

Care Path is built as a robust REST API using Django and Django REST Framework (DRF) for the Backend.

Queue Management: The core logic uses django-lifecycle hooks to maintain queue integrity. When a patient joins or leaves, the system automatically recalculates positions. AI Integration: We leveraged the Google Gemini API (google-genai) to build intelligent features. The system processes images of drugs to verify authenticity and checks symptom compatibility. Concurrency Control: To prevent race conditions when multiple patients join simultaneously, we implemented database locking mechanisms.

This ensures every patient gets a unique and correct queue number.

Challenges we ran into

• Managing scope: Merging three core features required strict prioritization to avoid feature creep.
• Time constraints: Balancing development, testing, and presentation within limited time was a constant challenge.
• Concurrency & Data Integrity: One of the biggest hurdles was ensuring that queue numbers remained consistent under load. Implementing transaction.atomic() and select_for_update() was crucial to solve this.

• Making use of the React Leaflet component was kind of confusing at first.

• Websocket integration

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

• Advanced Django Patterns: I gained a deep understanding of database transactions and model hooks to automate business logic.
• Healthcare solutions must be simple. In emergencies, clarity and speed matter more than complexity.
• Integrated systems create greater impact. Combining related solutions proved more powerful than building them in isolation.
• Learnt more about API integration, Websockets

What's next for Care Path

Care Path aims to:

• Reduce harm caused by counterfeit drugs
  
• Improve emergency response decision-making
  
• Decongest hospitals and improve patient experience
  

In the future, Care Path can integrate national drug registries, emergency response systems, and public health data to scale its impact across regions.

Built With

• axios
• django
• django-rest-framework
• google-gemini
• javascript
• nextjs
• python
• react
• react-query
• tailwindcss