Technology

Part of the core aim of Medisense was to utilise cutting-edge techonology to be able to deliver interactive medical resources to students.

The technology team is in a unique position in Medisense in that there is inevitably tech involvement with every project – beavering away behind the scenes, occasionally fiddling with the shade of orange or making a change to the server system.

And whilst the majority of the work of tech is in supporting the frankly enormous talents of our content, art and events teams there is huge scope in making beautiful and clever strides forward in how that content is delivered.

Our most visible activity is maintaining and updating the website. There are over 335 thousand lines of code beneath the website, with multiple layers of abstraction and epic levels of frameworks to support huge amounts of content.

Medisense is built on top of a heavily in-house modified version of the Symphony CMS with Javascript frameworks on top and utilising Bootstrap-based styling to give a consistent experience across all types of device.

We have even built our own scaffolds for games and other interactive elements, as well as more recently replicating functionality from Vine.

Even the blurriest of vision can tell that the website never stays looking the same way for long…

It seems like no organisation these days can be without an app of some form, but often these can be nothing more than the content redistributed in a more ‘appy’ form. Medisense wanted to provide genuinely useful functionality in our apps with a key philosophy being ‘useful offline’ – there’s no point in having a beautiful educational app if the mobile signal disappears in the far corner of the common room.

A common design framework means our content can be instantly recognised as soon as you fire the app up.

Tom (the tech team lead) has always had a passion for mixing the worlds of software and healthcare, so found a perfect combination of tech and medicine in the Online Patient Simulator.

This aims to bridge the gap between e-learning and high-fidelity simulation providing the ability to bring the learning opportunities of interactive simulation to a wider audience in a cost-effective way.

The simulated patient runs completely within the web browser, allowing users to interact with them and move through scenarios by responding to events and information – much like they would in a simulation in the classroom.

This project generated so much enthusiasm within the simulation community that we were invited to present at the North East Simulation Network conference, the ASPIH national conference and even travelled across the world to California to present at the Stamford University Medicine X Education conference!

Life is hard as any form of healthcare student or professional. Sadly, a huge amount of time is spent doing things that are not making best use of carefully honed skills. Technology will never replace human intuition or creativity but huge ground can be gained by getting people and technology to focus on what they do best.

The tech team has created a demonstration artificial intelligence classifier platform, mostly to prove that it could be done, but also to create a springboard for future projects to aid students in finding online resources that will be most valuable to them.

You can visit our classifier here.

Technology is growing in healthcare and medical professionals are perfectly positioned to ride the wave and produce some amazing stuff!

There is almost nothing that can’t be accomplished in software and all that is fundamentally required is enthusiasm for cool tech.