janreges

I am the father of a 2-year-old, extremely premature son with a complicated medical condition. We visit more than 15 doctors and I decided, as a volunteer, to create a project next year that should help all parents and doctors to effectively exchange information, medical reports, records and visualization of various growth or health information, etc. I have already received a promise of cooperation and confirmation of the contribution of this project from a number of leading doctors from various hospitals.

I am an architect, developer and server administrator, team leader with more than 20 years of experience and dozens of large projects from analysis, through frontend/backend, to database, network and hardware.

I am considering whether to use the PostgreSQL database directly for the project and program all my own backend, or to use self-hosted Supabase with row-level security, which would eliminate approx. 70-80% backend for GraphQL/REST API. The time saved on backend programming could be spent on other useful functions for end users - integrating AI into some processes, etc.

The entire solution will be run on our own powerful servers (AMD EPYC 9554, Intel Optane NVME drives, 768GB DDR5 RAM)

Does anyone have any current experience (not more than 6 months old) on the basis of which you would recommend or not recommend Supabase for such a project? I've read a couple of negative experiences from 2023, but I wonder if it has improved over the last year. If you answer, please provide specific experience and why YES/NO.

Thank you very much for any advice.

I'm a father of a 1.5-year-old child who was born extremely prematurely and has a serious medical diagnosis. As part of our care, we regularly see 15 doctors/specialties in several hospitals/outpatient clinics and have around a hundred medical reports. We meet a variety of parents and there is a tremendous burden placed on such families - logistical, administrative, financial, information and data (collecting various data, information and milestones about the child's progress).

This personal journey has highlighted for me the pressing need for better digital solutions to support families like mine and the healthcare professionals who care for our children. I continuously consult with doctors or other parents to make sure that such a platform has a real target audience.

With 20 years of experience as a lead developer, server administrator, and CTO, I've worked on dozens of large-scale projects. However, I've never collaborated with volunteer or open-source developers.

I'm considering developing a free, ad-free online platform to help families manage medical information and improve communication with healthcare providers—completely non-profit, with no monetization involved. We would run the solution on our servers that we already have and for some functions (e.g. SMS notifications) we would try to approach telecommunication operators as SMS sponsors. In an ideal scenario, in case of success of such a platform, the state administration would take over the responsibility for the operation of this platform. The platform should be developed as open-source and if it proves successful in one country (my country in the EU will be the first), the ambition of the authors and the consulting health professionals should be to help to promote it in other countries.

Key features include:

1) Centralizing medical documentation for easy sharing.

2) Provide doctors with a comprehensive view of the child's medical history (including visuals, timeline from birth, charts, etc.)

3) Simplifying scheduling and communication with multiple specialists.

4) Integrating AI to manage and interpret medical data - for the purpose of auto-categorizing, summarizing, assignment to parts of the human body or picking a date for the next visit - not to replace a medical examination!

5) Implementation of useful functions for doctors and parents according to their own expressed needs, for which neither state systems nor their software offer any solution.

My question to the community is: Do you think it's realistic to find volunteer developers who would contribute to such a project purely as a service to society? Or is this an overly optimistic idea? Do you believe that it is possible to inspire and motivate some experienced developers to participate for free in the development of a platform that should then be known by many parents and doctors across the country? Unfortunately, government institutions don't create such projects and the private sector has to have a business model to want to do it.

Note: with this post I am not looking for the developers themselves for this platform. I am only interested in your personal experience and opinion if it is real or if I am completely naive.

I'd greatly appreciate any insights, experiences, or advice you might have, especially if you've worked on similar altruistic projects.

Thank you everyone!