xavier collantes

Prescription Blockchain

By Xavier Collantes

In 2018, I sponsored a student engineering capstone team at Gonzaga University. Shortly after graduating, I wanted to continue making an impact in my community with many of my friends still at Gonzaga.

"Sir, this is a Walgreen's"

Back in 2017, I needed to refill a medication so I waited in line for an hour at a Walgreen's. Once it was my turn, the pharmacist asked for my ID and ran my name.

"You're not in the system", said the pharmacist.

Then I realized I usually filled my medication at Rite Aid! Not Walgreens's!

"Do you have the prescription on you?", the pharmacist asked. Of course I didn't have the tiny paper the doctor gives you at the office, I'm a millennial.

Pictures, documents, credit cards, and receipts are all digital... why not prescriptions?

Proposal

One morning Mehak Bharagava, a former classmate and Gonzaga Computer Science student at the time and I were discussing the popular technology which was Blockchain. She said "wouldn't it be cool to learn about the cutting edge in for our degree?" and I figured "why not? If you find students interested, I'll look into sponsoring a crew!"

So the next week I virtually met with Mehak Bharagava, Jeb Kilfoyle, Maxwell Dulin, Jacob Krantz, and Andrew Yang, students interested in an off-the-beaten path for a senior project.

My proposal was to implement a user-friendly application which tracked medical prescriptions on a Blockchain technology, a "Prescription on the Blockchain". Benefits included:

Digitized prescriptions
No "double spend" problem
Interchangeable with different pharmacies
Offline support

Project plan

In our first meetings, I lived in the Bay Area, California and we had to call in through video to Spokane, Washington.

Since I was freshly graduated myself, I had my first opportunities to use my newly minted Program and Project Management skills I learned on the job. Together, we created an outline of work, delegation of duties, milestones, due dates, and initial design ideas.

The work was divided into two major parts at first then split into child tasks once we had our questions answered:

Frontend design: Users must have an easy time to perform basic functions
Research: Which implementation blockchain do we want to use?

Personally, my duties were outline requirements, take on financial costs (nearly none because all software utilized was open source), provide mentorship, and introduce subject-matter experts if need be.

Meeting on Senior Day

As the close of their student careers, the students were all excited; especially our team. The exposition day for the senior projects was the first our team had met in person.

When noon came, our team had reviewed other booths and I was delighted at the ingenuity of the other engineering student groups. I was so proud of our group to take on a wildly new technology for the sake of learning. Even more so, to agree to have a sponsor as young as me.

Winning 1st place

Panel composed of professors

The professors were impressed and our team was awarded 1st place in the Computer Science Department and 3rd out of 50 in the School of Engineering overall!