Empty Appointment
Symptom List
Symptom List
Additional Information
Additional Information
Awaiting Appointment
Push Notification
Appointment Details
Scheduled Appointment

Inspiration

Zeke had an appointment for a physical on November 2nd but had an unexpected business trip and had to cancel at the last minute. Because Zeke gave such short cancellation notice, his doctor now has no patients to see during that time because it’s unlikely another visit will be scheduled to fill that slot.

Joey has had a sore throat for two weeks and is worried since his colds don’t usually last this long. He would normally schedule a doctor's appointment, but he has recently been affected by homelessness and can’t afford insurance or his usual visit. Enter Facil. Through the Facil smartphone app, he is able to request to see any doctor with an opening in their schedule from last minute cancellations. Since Zeke canceled his visit, Joey is given the opportunity to take the now empty appointment at no cost. By using Facil for free checkups, Joey is able to avoid the development of long term issues and maintain a healthier lifestyle.

What it does

When someone cancels a doctor's appointment on short notice, the time slots usually go unfilled, and the patient is assessed a late fee. Facil uses these open slots and late fees to give medical facilities a charitable opportunity to accept patients for no cost to the client.

How we built it

We started our night with three industries in mind: finance, health, and transportation. Through a three-part design charrette, we brainstormed for user groups and eventually narrowed our choice down to health and finance with a focus on homeless populations. With our user group in place, we started to list necessary features and wireframe the interactions. Throughout the night, we split the work amongst the four designers while the developer built the framework for the application based on our wireframes. Each of the designers took on a screen and various other visual elements such as branding and mockup presentations. We made many iterations of each screen to ensure the user flow was beautifully simple and user friendly while adhering to industry standard design and engineering principles.

Challenges we ran into

The ideation of our user groups took a very long time. We had lots of difficult conversations about our skills, interests, and user needs, which shifted our course of action a handful of times before we learned where the intersection of our passions was. Discussing our capabilities and how we could best collaborate to create the most social good led us to build a solution for homeless populations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the potential social impact of Facil. Individuals affected by homelessness are a very underrepresented population in the technology sector even though the vast majority of these individuals have smart phones. We are proud to have taken initial steps toward increasing the quality of life of this group by utilizing time that would otherwise have been wasted. Facil is a utilization of current systems we believe are faulty.

What we learned

The greatest challenge we faced also afforded us the greatest learning opportunity. Tough conversations showed us the importance of advocating for ideas we believe in and not settling on a project for efficiency’s sake. Through collaboration we were able to make something we are all proud to display while also believing in the underlying cause.

What's next for Facil

In the future, we aim to build the backend server interaction to update the application with open doctor’s appointments. This interface would connect to hospital databases and provide real-time updates to Facil users. For the future, we want to set up a verification process to give each user a unique identifier as they open the app for the first time. This unique identifier would be either a phone or email integrated with their Apple Medical ID (if applicable) that allows the hospital database to book the user for an appointment.