Doctors for Her

Doctors recommended by women for women.

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Inspiration

The medical field is filled with unconscious bias that negatively affects women. Women are less likely to have their concerns taken seriously and than men when it comes to healthcare, which can lead to unresolved health problems and even death. Our goal is that this site would be used to connect women to quality doctors in their area who will treat them with respect and dignity, so that the women can get the care they need.

What it does

Doctors for Her is a website that allows women to find doctors that will take their concerns seriously. Women input their zip code and are provided with a list of doctors near them that are ranked based on reviews from other women.

How we built it

We built Doctors for Her using Flask in Python. The front end was done in HTML and CSS while the backend used Flask to respond to requests and Ajax/jQuery to display results on the page. The doctor review data is scraped from the web. Our quick idea for filtering reviews from women was comparing the names of reviewers to the top 1000 girls names. We would then average these reviews

Challenges we ran into

  • One of the first challenges we ran into was deciding on what languages and frameworks to use. On the first day, we decided on React and NodeJS but come Saturday morning, our team was unsure on this, and after some discussion with a mentor, we settled on Python and Flask
  • Figuring out how to handle the location data was an issue. We didn’t realize until the second day that Google Maps might be a good feature to use to handle calculating the distances from the zip codes provided by the user to the doctor’s offices, but by then it was a bit too late to get the Google Cloud credits. We also weren’t sure about how to get around using Google Maps without having to provide a credit card number. Ultimately we ran out of time, but that’s something we hope to investigate more into the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning so much Flask over a weekend was something we were all really excited about. One of our members also learned how to scrape a web page in one day. Although we didn’t get to finish as much as we would have liked, we were really proud of pushing ourselves to learn new things. We learned so much from this hackathon that we might not have been able to if we played it safe with techniques we already knew how to use.

What we learned

We learned an incredible amount about web development in general this weekend. Some team members were more experienced than others and pushed themselves to learn new frameworks, while other team members got to try building a website for the first time. The team never used Flask before, and we each had the chance to try working with new tools. All in all, this hackathon was a great learning experience, and we’ve all left with skills that we’re excited to keep using.

What's next for Doctors for Her

Ultimately, we’d love for Doctors For Her to be a place that women all over the world to visit and submit reviews for any experiences they’ve had with healthcare, good or bad. We’d love to rely on internal reviews rather than data scraped from the web. We’d also love to incorporate some intersectionality with features specific to groups like indigenous and black women.

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