Covid Protocols was a project that was born out of the need to get quality information out to the people saving lives. We had to create a platform that allowed for over 100 authors to edit simultaneously, publish, and share information about how to treat patients of multiple diseases and disorders during the early days of the pandemic.

The First Problem

This platform was meant to be for doctors authored by other doctors. The last thing doctors wanted was to learn a CMS that added time to their day. They already used Google Docs for all sorts of things and their first question was: is there a way we can take a set of google docs and create an app from it?

The problem is that most hospital systems won't allow connection to systems like google--so we had to write something that grabbed their information from those docs, parse them into a readable format, and allow them to be accessed while offline.

Did you know that Google Docs has an API for parsing their content as JSON? Neither did I... It took us quite a while to decipher how something as visual as a document is broken down in JSON, but once we got a general understanding, we realized we had to write some robust middleware to extract that content and parse it in a meaningful way.

Tech Stack

The workflow ended up being:

1. Doctor edits a google doc
2. Via a custom Google Doc addon I wrote, they hit "publish"
3. That triggers a cloud function that parses the doc
4. Our middleware cloud function saves the parsed content to a Google Cloud Bucket
5. The mobile app (React Native) downloads the stored content if it has an internet connection
6. App formats files, allowing user to view them offline

There ended up being a lot of steps in terms of implementing, but the end result was an easy experience for the end users (the doctors authoring this stuff). They could keep using the same tools they'd been using (Google Docs) and with the click of one button, publish changes out to everyone using the app.

Testimonial

There was massive urgency to get quality information out to the people saving lives. Upstatement designed an amazing product with lightning turn around that allowed us to edit with over 100 authors simultaneously.

• Dr. C. Lee Cohen, Pulmonary and Critical-care Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Hi all, I’m Mark, a Chief Resident ... . During the peak of the pandemic in 2020 I was a daily visitor of the CovidProtocols website which served as a huge help to myself and my colleges during such a stressful time when ‘best practices’ were evolving so rapidly. I really appreciate the amazing work your team provided in helping BWH efficiently deliver and disseminate their content.”