Inspiration: While I was taking a Foundations of Cultural Competence course at my university, we discussed the topic of accessibility, and it really brought for me into light how big of an issue accessibility overall is and how the variety of disabilities present around me which I never even realized existed. I once visited the medicare.gov website and observed that the website is not very user friendly for those with disabilities which inspired me to make something better- an app that truly makes healthcare access easier for everyone
What it does: The app helps users find local healthcare services like clinics, mental health support, urgent care, and preventative care inside the United States. It also lets users set reminders for appointments, all with a focus on digital accessibility so everyone can use it comfortably.
How we built it: I used this app using python and the ui interface using the streamlit python library. I currently have a dummy dataset of 25 entries to help us run the app, but the whole idea is to create a system where the list of health care resources are maintained and put in the app.
Challenges we ran into: The challenge that I ran into was making the ui interface since I have never used streamlit before and had to figure out how to make it run. Secondly I also had a hard time finding a dataset with all the needed variables and health care resources in the USA and hence had to create a dummy one for testing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: I’m really proud that we tackled a project focused on social good and made progress so quickly. Learning to use Streamlit in just one day was a huge win, and it felt great to see my idea come to life!
What we learned: We learned how important it is to design with accessibility from the ground up, not as an afterthought. Also, integrating digital tools like text-to-speech can make a real difference. And it also made me realize that data collection and maintenance is very important if we want such things to work.
What's next for Health Care Resource: Create a good database with all the registered health care resources in the USA and maintaining it and probably enhancing the app with a lot more different accessibility features since this is just a prototype.
