HealthBridge

Inspiration

The idea of HealthBridge began as a realization of a common problem around the world – health disparities in low-income areas. The inspiration came from lower-income families and their struggles with the American healthcare system and its affordability, with the high costs for larger operations such as surgeries, which are both necessary and expensive.

What it does

Health Bridge connects medical professionals who are willing and able to give healthcare advice for free with people who lack access to healthcare. There is a sign in and log in page for both the volunteers and the patients. The volunteers can sign up to be included in the database once they fill out the sign up to be a volunteer page. Once they hit submit, it gets recorded in the data table and we will verify their account through going to their reference. Once the verification is done, the app will manually upload the contact information and other information on the volunteer page for patients to see. Patients can then contact the volunteers directly, privately, and one-on-one to discuss their healthcare concerns.

How we built it

We used Code.org's App Lab to build the essential components of our app. App Lab uses JavaScript and block-based programming to create mobile apps that are usable over a variety of devices. We learned from online tutorials and forum posts in order to program the different screens that are in our app. Our prior knowledge of languages like JavaScript and Python also came into use when editing the text version of the code.

Challenges we ran into

One challenge we ran into was synchronizing the screens of the app. Since only one person could be on the app at one time, when we first started coding, multiple people were on it at the same time leading the code to have many errors as having more than one person on the code.org app at the same time does not save everyone's edits like google docs. So, we each had to create our separate projects that had a specific feature. For example, Favour created a separate app for messaging, Caitlyn for the login and sign-in page, and Smriti for the volunteer database. Then we transferred our separate apps to our shared code.org account at different times– each of us worked on a specific piece of the puzzle and combined them for the greater whole.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to advance our understanding of code through making the app and grew our group working abilities. One thing we are proud about was solving issues such as our time management and coding and learning how to persist, creating a project we are proud of.

What we learned

As a team, we learned many things such as time management and collaboration. Time management was our biggest challenge since we all had different breaks throughout the day, when one of us was free, many weren't. This made it hard to communicate with each other and relay information and ideas. However, we tackled this issue by setting up a time in which we would call to discuss everyone's individual tasks for the week. We also learned how to collaborate efficiently on Code.org by creating separate pages on our own accounts and transferring the code to our main app, in addition to setting up times when each person would access the main app. In this way, we got around the issue where one person could only be on the main app at one time or else it would mess up the code. One thing we learned in technical skills was how to create and store data for our volunteer database. Another thing was the messaging component of our app where we learned how to create a record based on previous user’s inputs. Data tables and a combination of logic reasoning in JavaScript allowed us to save the inputs and show it to other users.

What's next for HealthBridge

When consulting with the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, they suggested an area of improvement– to make the healthcare advice be more equal to all people– was to add features for medical professionals to read and be informed about how to treat all patients unbiasedly. This training feature would make healthcare treatment, not just access, more equal.