insightScope 2021 – Healthcare Conference Dashboard for Systematic and Scoping Reviews

Posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021

Client	Dr. Dayre McNally MD, Katie O’Hearn MSc, Misty Pratt MES
Professor(s)	Kevin Holmes,
Program	Mobile Application Design and Development, Computer Engineering Technology – Computing Science
Students	Ravi Chandra Rachamalla (Research Associate – Full Stack Developer – Mobile Application Design and Development) Dhruv Patel (Research Assistant – Full Stack Developer – Computer Engineering Technology – Computing Science) Nguyen Gia Khánh Hồ (Research Assistant – Full Stack Developer – Computer Engineering Technology – Computing Science) Manan Patel (Research Assistant – Full Stack Developer – Computer Engineering Technology – Computing Science)

Project Description:

insightScope, a web application that helps researchers manage and conduct crowdsourced systematic and scoping reviews was started as a collaboration of Algonquin students from SLiDE 2018 led by Sanket Patel and a team of researchers from the CHEO PICU; Dr. Dayre McNally MD, as well as Research Coordinators Katie O’Hearn MSc and Misty Pratt MES. Since its inception, insightScope strived to revolutionize and accelerate the process for a systematic review; originally performed by small single digit teams of investigators over long periods of time. Using researchers from around the world that have been appraised on our system, insightScope can provide a crowdsourced approach; vastly accelerating the process, from months and years down to weeks.
Over the past term, our insightScope team made up of the most recent collaboration of Algonquin Students from SLiDE and CHEO, had been working hard towards finalizing many new and invigorating updates to the front and backend of the application. Among these updates includes a dashboard to view the Project Overview and Timeline for a systematic review. This dashboard will enable principal investigators and researchers to promote their projects, view statistics about their level of contribution, and receive live updates. Creation of this dashboard is critical to the next stage of insightScope. Currently armed with our accelerated review capability we aim to begin integrating systematic reviews into the tens to hundreds of thousands of medical conferences hosted annually worldwide. Merging systematic reviews into these medical conferences provides a sensational opportunity to augment the conferences scholarly output. Providing a novel educational and networking opportunity to researchers in attendance and internationally.
Our Algonquin student team has been provided with many exciting opportunities to expand their skillsets. Being able to use many different technologies from Amazon Web Services and by participating in and developing large scale redesigns to core features of the site like the Title & Abstract and Data Abstraction stages of systematic reviews; our team was able to open themselves to many different areas of development. By exposing ourselves to cloud document storage with AWS S3, online sessions with Memcached, different types of web application security protocols and how to optimize memory and efficiency when developing for these worldwide userbases.
To ensure the delivery of a superior product, our Algonquin Team has been closely collaborating with the CHEO team to ensure efficacy of these features. Though as we know collaboration during the worldwide pandemic caused by Covid-19 comes with its own set of struggles. From the different types of bugs that could appear, discussions about new designs and features, and learning new technologies our team had a lot on our plate; too much for everyone alone and separated. Though with an agile development mindset in hand, we were able to better manage ourselves. With many online design sessions and constant communication our team was able to handle any problem that was thrown at us. Through this entire process we acquired many invaluable skills and experiences that aided us to accomplish our goals.