TRACK: Health 1) How do we educate people on healthy living practices to prevent costly medical interventions in the future? Our app is essentially a video call app that connects users from all over Indonesia to therapists in Jakarta. According to the Health track info session, healthcare in Indonesia is unsurprisingly centralized in Java, specifically Jakarta. Mental health in general is an issue that's not addressed enough in Indonesia, so if there's a lack of mental health resources in Jakarta, there's certainly a scarcity of such resources elsewhere in the country. We believe that since a good amount of young Indonesians use their phones or laptops, this app can potentially help open up the mental health conversation across the country.
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How do we provide health accessibility to ensure people get proper health regardless of location or socioeconomic status? This app is intended to match users anywhere in Indonesia to therapists in Jakarta. We intended to have both a chat and video call feature using Twilio, but due to time constraints, we were only able to deliver video calls on the prototype. However, we do believe that regardless of the user's location, as long as they have internet, if the app is deployed somewhere they are able to connect and talk to a therapist 1:1.
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How do we raise awareness, create conversations, and effective interventions on mental health? Even if one person uses the app, if they're able to connect to a mental health professional, that would certainly help push the user to a better life. The app, PsyConnect, is a mental health resource for anyone in Indonesia, a country where mental health conversations are still not prevalent even in its major cities. PsyConnect democratizes the resource to everyone regardless of their location or socioeconomic status.
Indonesia is a very centralized country with no exception for healthcare. Most of Indonesia's healthcare workers, centralize in java specifically in Jakarta. Less known areas are suffering because of the lack of healthcare workers in their area. Healthcare is not limited to physical but also mental thus since Indonesia currently already has startups building on physical health, we decided to create a project based on mental health.
We connect people from underrepresented areas in Indonesia with mental healthcare specialists from major cities in Indonesia in order to create accessibility. We connect them using a chat and video call system thus when the mental healthcare specialist or the patient prefers/need video call it is available just by a click of a button.
We believe we can improve in using machine learning to determine the most compatible mental healthcare specialist for a patient.