30 million Americans are uninsured. When they get sick, they face two bad options i.e google their symptoms and panic, or pay hundreds of dollars for a doctor visit they can't afford. We wanted to build something that actually helps: a smart, compassionate AI that tells you how serious your symptoms are and shows you free clinics right around the corner.

Also the name Dr. Stack made us laugh so we had to do it.

Dr. Stack is an AI health navigator for uninsured and low-income patients. You describe your symptoms in plain English. Dr. Stack does the following things:

  1. Asks smart follow-up questions to understand your situation
  2. Assesses urgency Emergency , Urgent , or Non-Urgent
  3. Finds free clinics near you using your ZIP code via the HRSA government API
  4. Explains everything in plain language

How I built it:

  • React + Vite for the frontend
  • Google Gemini API for the AI conversation and symptom assessment
  • HRSA Find a Health Center API (free US government API) for locating free clinics
  • Tailwind CSS for styling
  • AWS Amplify for deployment

For getting the AI to be medically responsible without being useless, we spent a lot of time on the system prompt to make sure it never diagnoses but still gives actionable advice. It also parses urgency levels from AI responses reliably. It makes the UI feel warm and approachable.

What I learnt was:

  • How to engineer prompts for sensitive, high-stakes domains like healthcare
  • How to use government public APIs (HRSA) that most people don't know exist
  • That 30 million uninsured Americans is a solvable problem with the right tools

What's next for Dr. Stack are:

  • Swap to AWS Bedrock for HIPAA-eligible AI inference
  • Add AWS Comprehend Medical to extract clinical terms from conversations
  • Add multilingual support for Spanish-speaking patients
  • Partner with hospital systems to reduce ER overcrowding

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