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Inspiration

Our project was inspired by healthcare disparities especially towards minorities or immigrants, such as our parents, that have trouble navigating the legal world when they first arrive in countries that offer economic and social opportunities. Along with that, we loved PoweringSTEMHacks mission.

We also know that every healthcare plan is vastly different and the thought of growing up and knowing we have to deal with it is sometimes overwhelming. Even knowing we have to pay for car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, motor, renting, traveling, and pet insurance—the list goes on!...

We wanted to extend this idea to a task managing app that could juggle all these types of insurance into one centralized area to focus on, along with a website that can easily explain all the types of insurance out there. However, we realized that more is not always better. Both Alan and I realized that out of all insurance, health insurance was surely one of the top priorities, and it fit well with our upbringing and immigrant parents.

We wanted to bring light to health insurance programs that my family had to take when we arrived from Korea, like the CHIP program, which helps families that were economically disadvantaged when they arrived in America without legal status.

After my parents spent time scouring the internet 13 years ago, we wished there were easier ways to get reliable healthcare plans, along with a place to track all payments regarding copayments, premiums, deductibles, etc!

And my parents were lucky to be granted information like this—a lot of families probably didn’t know about these plans, which is just one of the huge reasons why we wanted this idea to come true.

COVID-19 also altered the course of this world forever and one of the main lessons coming out of that is how susceptible the underprivileged are to health issues. Furthermore, the many members of our team have experienced personally, either from themselves, or from someone they know and love.

This also directly plays into the name of our application: Medi-Fair.

From Medi-Care, get it? Alan came up with that one, it was silly but I thought it was smart. Yes, we brought up how creative it was throughout this stressful but rewarding process.

What it does

Let’s go in order.

We created a website that’s fully functional with its own website pages, research, directories, links, resources, fun/educational quizzes, an intelligent chatbot, and an interactive insurance managing program.

We try to offer each user a personalized experience, with a self quiz to direct them to the resources they need! Getting help is already hard enough, but knowing you need help is even harder.

AI chatbot that directs our users to the resources and the help they need! Check the one we linked on the website here We offer a massive library of legal resources, especially PDF documents and forms for citizenship Sometimes you need legal statuses and specific documents to get insurance. However, we make sure to highlight how some programs are available for non-citizens! We created an interactive insurance manager and easy organization for immigrants, minorities, and literally anyone who doesn’t want to worry about healthcare insurance. Quizzes on the website to determine healthcare discrimination bias in medical services/providers or the best legal path for immigrants Translation feature FOR ALL FEATURES (QUIZZES, TASK MANAGER, WEBSITE) Possible back-end for account creation using databases

Our website also heavily stresses our resources page that’ll serve to direct all our users to the help they need and deserve. This page also shows sources to international audiences, and a lot of our links lead to places that have Australia or UK services.

**We’d also unfortunately like to note that this was Seeun’s very first time stepping into the world of front-end development—and watching 542 YouTube videos on re-learning how to code HTML/CSS/JS ever since middle school 6th grade. With this obstacle, she didn’t have enough time or quite literally, any idea, on how to host it. And yes, she did watch 34 YouTube videos. She also cried 3 times trying to set-up Git. But the Figma file is completely open and linked here You can also view the entire website and task managing app, along with how it was designed/created by Seeun!*

How we built it

We used Figma to design the UI of the entire website, along with the legal-help manager. Alan and I heavily referenced websites, such as U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service for legal forms and documents to provide on our website. We also utilized government websites(healthcare.gov, medicare.gov) and consolidated its complex information for our users.

To plan and execute our pitch, we used Google Docs, Milanote, and Taskade. Our personal experiences with these circumstances inspired me significantly, and I channeled that inspiration into my work. We aligned our graphics on Google Slides with the pitch.

The MEDIFAIR website was done through HTML and CSS coding with occasional JS for other effects.

Challenges we ran into

The toughest thing we had to deal with in this hackathon by far was the time constraint.

Our team was so inspired by this topic and inspired to create change that we really wanted our application to “have-it-all”. After all, our team’s main mission was increasing accessibility and diversity. However, we had to prioritize the features we felt would have the most impact and connect with the most amount of people possible.

Seeun- I was completely new to front-end development as a whole because I was so used to being a graphic designer, I heavily struggled with learning completely new languages at this time. However, with the experience I garnered throughout this Hack-A-Thon, I feel more comfortable in learning more about the language and improving messy code habits I developed throughout the way. Specifically, for the chatbot, shoving it in the website was a struggle, since it wasn’t loading/connecting.. Overall, we were able to get through this hurdle by working collaboratively and referencing tutorials.

Alan- This was my first time ever dabbling with creating an AI chatbot. Even though it was tough to get accustomed to building one, I ended up being thoroughly impressed with its results and its ability to process human responses. Overall, it was a great learning experience for me and I am so happy to have participated. I also had to make sure most of the translations for the website were correct and didn’t take any words out of context.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Graphic design: Creating and discussing all of the graphics/design options in a limited amount of time was definitely a challenge, especially since I had to learn an entirely new application (Protopie) for creating a functioning and fully interactive design. I'm really happy to have had Alan as my partner though, he led me on some ideas on how to improve the UI/suggested stuff I should do to make it more understandable (UX knowledge!!) for our audiences of minorities/immigrants/the youth.

Front-end: Creating the website in a short amount of time despite massive withdrawals in energy and stress, along with the endless bugs I encountered. What is the difference between padding and margins anyways sometimes?

Research: The research was time-consuming, especially researching a lot of aspects of health/life insurance. Along with that, other legal documents were altering my brain chemistry to a point of no-return because of how complex everything seemed. But it all worked out in the end after researching and really getting into it!

What we learned

Graphic design (Seeun)- I learned how to use protopie and VScode a lot more.. It was fun to experiment with it more. I also researched a lot about interactivity in the Spline. Choosing specific design choices, especially marketable aspects to our project was crucial. This meant we would want to use precise typography, fonts, colors, and overall style that emits the calming, comfortable vibe that our project needed to enunciate. I also honed my UI design ability to make the best task manager possible.

Front-end(Seeun): Relearned from scratch my HTML/CSS skills—extremely challenging but very worth it

Marketer(Alan): One of my big takeaways is improving at planning for the product and writing good messaging for this productI adored narrating the slides, pitching, and editing the scripts. I particularly enjoyed collaborating with our team to create the most versatile project possible.

Researching(Alan): The issue of medical disparity hits close to home. This is why I was so interested in researching more on solving these disparities as well as learning more about our healthcare system throughout this hackathon. I am very proud of being able to compile all of these resources for immigrants.

What's next for Medi-Fair

With our time limitations but large aspirations, we want to create a fully functional IOS/Phone/Tablet version of our app, along with a much better formatted website/better responsivity. We had lots of fun thinking of features and we were thinking of incorporating back-end related features in our insurance manager, such as account creation and searching for nearby community health centers and clinics.

We also would implement better graphics and more safety/organizational features for a more packed and powerful app, such as folders and a website version instead of just an app. Keyboards on a laptop or desktop are generally easier to type 40 pages on.

Another thing we wanted to implement was to partner with many medical providers, hospitals, and clinics, especially in majority-minority areas to introduce the app for patients to have. With marketing and algorithm experience, we could also reach this app even further throughout social media. Medifair could also connect with hundreds of healthcare providers and be easily accessible through cross-platforming data and making it easier for people to set up insurance details and planning.

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