Doctors Tracker

Project owner: Luka Petravić, Znanstveno društvo Sledilnik

Responsible person: Luka Petravić

2024

2,000 Euro Prize

SL

Civil Society / Social Economy

What is it about?

The Doctors Tracker portal was created to bring the healthcare system closer to the patient. In Slovenia, we are facing a shortage of doctors at primary level. This leaves many patients without the basic right of access to a personal GP. In the Scientific association Tracker, we imported the data that was publicly available every 15 days in a spreadsheet that was not user friendly into our portal and allowed users to suggest corrections for faulty data in real time. This gave patients seeking primary care user-friendly and up-to-date information.

Challenge

Lifelong health and disease prevention begins with primary medical care. In Slovenia, there is a tremendous unmet need for access to primary healthcare nationwide. This problem is worsened by a lack of easy-to-use, quality technological programs prioritizing UX to help patients find physicians. 

Idea

After leveraging the success of compiling complex data into a simple, understandable format during COVID-19, Tracker Scientific Society aims to address access to primary healthcare. We built Doctors Tracker, a user-friendly website with information updated by community crowd-sourcing to help others find healthcare providers. We continuously update this information and fix errors through open crowd-sourcing to empower patients on their healthcare journey.  

Actors

The project was developed by Tracker Scientific Society. The data uses open-source data from governmental agencies. Before releasing the crowdsourcing to the public, we consulted the National Medical Chamber of Slovenia. We integrated their feedback to improve the website’s UX and the accuracy of the terminology used. 

Impact

Since its inception, we have received over 1,100 corrections from users, of which nearly 700 improved publicly accessible data sets and fixed errors from official sources. The project also received the DigiVzornik.Si award from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Slovenia for its positive social impact on helping patients find primary care physicians and our citizen-science approach. 

Transfer

Our open-source project is powered by crowd-sourcing. The website could be easily used in other countries by mapping their data sets to ours. We have also translated it into all the languages of Slovenian minorities and other languages for immigrants who visit our page most frequently.