PathFinder
AI triage and referral platform for the Lake Macquarie & Newcastle Suicide Prevention Network. Built with a teammate at NGM Group's hackathon, May 2026.
The problem
Someone reaches out to a small suicide-prevention network at 11pm. The staff who could help are asleep, the intake form is a PDF, and whoever picks it up tomorrow has no way to tell whether this person needs a callback next week or a phone call right now.
What I built
A 24/7 intake chatbot, a QR-based referral portal for frontline staff, and a dashboard that gave the organisation its first analytics. Rule-based risk scoring routes each referral to staff by the training level it requires, across 14 programs, backed by a five-layer escalation protocol and 35+ documented edge cases. FastAPI, Azure AI Language, React. LMNSPN's CEO has since met with us about taking it into production.
One decision
Crisis numbers survive the backend. Lifeline's number is hardcoded in static HTML. If the API is down, the model is rate-limited, or the deploy is broken, the page still shows a human being to call. Everything else in the system is best-effort; that one element is not permitted to depend on anything. The same instinct drove the risk engine: it's rules, not a model, because when it's wrong we need to be able to read why, and borderline cases escalate rather than resolve.