Covid Protocols was born out of the need to get quality information to the people saving lives. We had to create a platform that allowed over 100 authors to edit simultaneously, publish, and share information about how to treat patients during the early days of the pandemic.
100 doctors, one Google Doc each, zero training sessions →
01The First Problem
This platform was 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, parsed it into a readable format, and allowed it to be accessed offline. Did you know Google Docs has an API for parsing content as JSON? Neither did I. It took a while to decipher how something as visual as a document is broken down in JSON, but once we understood it, we wrote robust middleware to extract that content and parse it in a meaningful way.
02Tech Stack
The workflow: a doctor edits a Google Doc. Via a custom Google Docs add-on I wrote, they hit “publish.” That triggers a cloud function that parses the doc; our middleware saves the parsed content to a Google Cloud Bucket; the React Native app downloads the stored content when it has a connection and formats the files for offline viewing.
A lot of steps to implement, but the end result was an easy experience for the doctors authoring it. They kept using the tools they already used and, with one click, published changes to everyone using the app.
“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.”