BabySteps

Find local specialists who will meet your needs!

Inspiration

In our personal lives, we experienced having to wait 7 hours in the ER only to get a referral to a specialist. The only appointment available was in 4 months. We want to help a group of people that are severely impacted by an inaccessible medical system. Babysteps mission is to provide fast and easy access to health practitioners and specialists for prenatal care in the most impoverished areas in America.

What it does

Our website allows user to make appointments with specialists that fit their needs. This include doctors that fit their speciality, city, date, time, insurance, and language. If the doctor is unavailable at a time, the user can request a notification when the doctor becomes available.

How we built it

We built our website on Replit using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this particular matter, due to the time of the hackathon and our current level of expertise in web development, we put our main focus on the frontend and learned a lot about HTML and CSS. Further steps would include academic workshops on JavaScript and integrating the front and backend of the website. Learning this and adding more assets would put our website and idea on a higher level.

Challenges we ran into

Our team is made up of people who are new to web development and have no experience with the programming languages listed above. It took a lot of time and discussion among us to develop some basic skills in this sector, but we're proud to say that we were able to attend workshops throughout these two days, create a website, and come up with a niche idea that has even more potential in the future once we master our skills in these fields. Integration of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript has become a major challenge for all of us, and we believe we will need to focus our efforts on this aspect the most in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We gained some basic web development skills and learned a lot about product marketing, effective time management when developing a new idea, how to improve our LinkedIn profiles, and how to deal with technical interview questions. We are proud to say that we learned a variety of new things during this hackathon, and despite not getting as much sleep - we gained more experience in the field of web design and development, and we worked with and met a lot of new people who were amazing mentors and advice-givers.

What we learned

We learned a lot about HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript, and how to connect different pages of the website. We learned how to make the button to lead to another HTML page, which was our incredible accomplishment. Although these may seem like a primary set of skills, we are proud of what we come up with, and how much we learned this weekend; we are going to make sure to develop this idea, as well as our skills, even further.

What's next for BabySteps

The next steps for BabySteps would definitely be adding more assets on the site - and programming the backend more specifically, so it could be implemented in the area we planned on spreading this on. This could be a completely new approach to healthcare for pregnant womxn, and it would make an inclusive and safe environment for them. Technically, we would also add more options such as described in the presentation - online scheduling monthly appointments with their doctor, alerts for appointments that were previously not available but got canceled - primarily for emergency appointments, a community of pregnant women in order to support each other, give advice about the pregnancy journey, donations to other pregnant women the maternity clothes, unused cribs, high chairs, and much more. Next to that, the assets that would put our site on an even higher level would be adding: Blog by Mammas in your area (finding a supportive community of pregnant women for advice and to make meaningful connections on your way to motherhood), Midwives, doula, nutritionists, doctors all in one portal (making all prenatal care appointments in one easy step), Donate kids clothes, maternity clothes, toys (creating a sustainable circular economy).