Isthmus Care

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Inspiration

Charlotte Austrew is a 68-year-old grandmother living in the Tennessee countryside with her best friend, Dixie, a dog she slept beside every night. One morning, Charlotte found Dixie sick and unable to walk. Through tears, she recounts how the vet gave her best friend a terminal diagnosis. Unable to afford the medication, Charlotte watched Dixie pass away.

For me, Charlotte's story hit close to home. When I was twelve, my mom used to joke that I was a junior zookeeper. With one toad, six fish, two birds, a snapping turtle, and my prized bearded dragon, our living room seemed to hold every animal under the sun.

Many saw my hobby as tedious, but in each animal I saw a personality, each critter quirky in its own way. One day, my bearded dragon became ill, refusing to eat and vomiting what was left in its stomach.

My family was fortunate enough to afford the medication, but the weight I felt that week has stayed with me. It made me ask a simple question:

"What if we didn't have the money?"

Charlotte's story frustrates me because her tragedy was preventable, but it also reminds me how fortunate I am.

How we built it

As a team, we built Isthmus Care to address this inequality. Isthmus Care is a web app designed for a tablet in the exam room, where the vet and the owner review a plan together on one screen. The vet enters the details of the pet's case, then sorts each treatment into Essential now, Recommended soon, or Nice to have. The owner's side, which I built, explains these groups before showing the customized plans. It then lets owners choose what to do today while a live total tracks their budget. If the cost is still too high, the app points them to lower-cost Madison clinics, along with resources for finding more affordable medications if they're eligible.

To help vets draft plans, our FastAPI backend searches Databricks for similar past cases, and Claude uses them to suggest and explain treatments. The vet always makes the final decision. Each approved plan is saved alongside the original AI draft, so future suggestions learn from real vet decisions. We started with about 300 synthetic cases generated with Claude. The frontend runs on Next.js, React, and Tailwind, and Neon Postgres stores the price catalog and plans.

Challenges we ran into

As a freshman, I had never built a full project in twenty-four hours, and the pace pushed me more than any personal project. My biggest challenge was the visual effects. I had to track down bugs frame by frame until I discovered what was freezing the app or causing errors. A single invalid comment inside an SVG broke our ripple transition entirely, and every effect needed a fallback for devices without WebGL.

Working as a team also meant everyone had to be in sync. Our frontend and backend had to have consistent data formats, and merging everyone's branches took a significant amount of coordination.

What we learned

These fourteen hours showed me what building software on a real team looks like: splitting work clearly and trusting teammates with their parts. On the technical side, I learned about the differences between laptop and iPad interfaces, discovering that hover effects behave differently on touch screens. Most of all, I learned that the user interface matters as much as what is shown. Explaining the three groups before any prices appear affects how an owner feels about the bill. There were frustrating moments, but seeing the final product with my team gave me an unmatched sense of satisfaction.

I can't help but think of people like Charlotte whom Isthmus Care could help. Something I didn't tell you about Charlotte is that she had a second pet, a cat, who, like Dixie, became very ill. Just like before, the treatment was unaffordable. This time, however, PBS News stepped in and told her about cheaper alternative treatments, the kind our app would point owners to. Charlotte's cat was saved.

I'm very fortunate to have my bearded dragon today. I'm even more fortunate to have the chance to help owners across the nation say the same.