HealthDisplaced

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  Health Displaced

Inspiration

A lack of housing is far from the only issues that homeless individuals face. With lack of support, information, and assistance services, the homeless population is largely unaware of and isolated from proper healthcare services.

Currently, the only assistance most homeless individuals have is from outreach workers, who may be able to provide assistance with registering for medical insurance (free for most homeless individuals but often not taken advantage of), arranging medical appointments, addressing medical issues, etc. However, the current infrastructure for outreach workers to reach out and stay connected with these individuals is either very unreliable or nonexistant. Often, these are one-time street encounters or buried in some excel-like platform unlikely to be revisited in the near future, if at all.

What it does

HealthDisplaced is a platform designed to address this. We offer a platform for outreach workers and companies to record any and all health-related data from homeless encounters on a case-by-case basis. Our platform allows outreach workers to input data on important information like location, medical insurance status, date since last medical checkup, immediate health concerns, and more. It also flags contacts when pressing action is needed, such as when it has been more than a year since a particular contact's last medical check-up. It's easy to use, comprehensive, and great streamlines the case-recording process for outreach workers.

How we built it

We built this using React as our frontend, and Convex as our backend. We used Convex to store all relevant data for homeless encounters, and powerful React component-based features allowed us to generate an easy-on-the-eye, organized, and aesthetic platform to record health-related homeless encounters.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time working with web development, so we found that there was a huge learning curve. We faced issues with intuitively thinking about design through code, debugging usage of state and context, and ensuring that everything we built could work in tandem with each other.

Conclusion

All in all, we believe that HealthDisplaced meets a really strong, yet largely overlooked need. The plight of the homeless and the efforts of outreach workers is huge issue in our society and largely growing. Our platform provides the opportunity to increase the efficiency and ease at which this issue is being addressed, and I think that's pretty powerful.

What's next for HealthDisplaced

First, we'd love to implement more features, such as a more comprehensive flagging feature, action item reminders, a map to track real-time encounters, and more. After that, we'd love to get this into the hands of social outreach companies so that outreach workers can take advantage of the ease and convenience the platform offers.

Built With

• convex
• react