MedMate wins Rep. Paul Tonko’s Congressional App Challenge in New York’s 20th District

When asked what inspired the creation of MedMate, Daniel Joseph said, “I was inspired to create this app (MedMate) by my family, due to the fact that I grew up surrounded by nurses (my mom, sister, multiple aunts, grandma, etc.). Seeing how dedicated they are to helping others made me want to build something to help support them in their work and studies (specifically helping my sister with her studies). The idea came to me after my sister mentioned how her nursing assignments lacked the real-world experiences that would be found in an actual medical environment. She kept complaining about how all these apps lacked tools to help her, such as tools that gave an analysis of how well she did or how efficient she was in her diagnosis. She constantly talked about how it just wasn’t the same as having a real person being diagnosed and responding to her. That’s why I wanted to create a way to bring that environment to her because it would be something that would help her study more effectively and feel more of a connection to the fake patients she’s diagnosing. She also told me that while there are some applications that try to mimic patient interactions, most of them are very unreliable and don’t truly help students learn due to the fact that they can’t speak back. That motivated me to create this application so that she could have a functional, realistic, and meaningful application to use for studying.

“However, this application isn’t just for my family or my sister; it is also for my friends who want to go into the medical field. That’s one of the biggest reasons I was so excited to build it. I realized that this idea didn’t solely apply to my family, but to so many others who are passionate about medicine and helping others. I loved developing it because it wasn’t just a random project I thought of, but rather it was something meaningful that I got to share with my family and friends to help them study and learn better. What I loved most about this was that I got feedback from both my family and friends on things they would want in an application like this and how I could make the experience more authentic for them, which allowed me to make this app more personal to people who are in the medical field/want to be in the medical field.”