HealthHub

Inspiration

Common problems in mental healthcare often tie to its affordability and availability, which tie strongly with insurance coverage. The ever-increasingly complex healthcare system makes it difficult to find nearby healthcare providers that will accept insurance and with countless different healthcare offerings, it's very easy to end up paying full price for mental health care. This results in many patients neglecting their own mental health to preserve financial stability.

What it does

HealthHub allows users to scan their health insurance card, and returns a map of nearby healthcare providers to the user. This allows them to efficiently assess their options based on proximity and coverage, which enables them to overcome some of the obstacles to attain care.

How we built it

We used Google Cloud Vision to implement OCR that enables the users to scan their insurance cards. We then check the contents of the card against a list of common insurers in the US to determine the user's healthcare provider.

After determining the provider, we return a map of the user's current location with respect to nearby covered practitioners. These psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals are sourced from the insurer's coverage list and are stored in a database using Firestore. We then plot their locations on the map using the maps API.

Challenges we ran into

We had a lot of issues reading the data from Firestore as readable, plottable strings for use in other areas of the application.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Successfully (and quickly) implementing OCR; we haven't used much of the Google Cloud suite, so this was a learning experience for all of us. We also struggled with plotting the points due to accidentally redrawing the entire view and overwriting markers.

What we learned

The healthcare industry is difficult to navigate when it comes to mental health. However, through continued efforts to make it more accessible to everyone, we will be able to facilitate that those in need can receive needed care.

What's next for HealthHub

Due to time constraints, there are a lot of optimization/performance tweaks. Additionally, for demo purposes, the database of mental healthcare providers is not fully fleshed out and needs to be properly scraped from the Health Insurance websites.

Additionally, we would like to implement more data fields tied to the marker and features that were omitted - such an anonymous rating system of mental health practices and filtered views