Queer Clinique

Did the hack address a clearly defined problem space that benefited from this development?

Our project handled the topic of health care equity. We wanted to improve the diversity in local clinical research trials. To do this, we created Queer Clinique, which is a website where queer individuals can look up clinical trials that are occurring/looking for participants based on, and researchers can post opportunities. This way more queer people can be involved and thus be further represented in ongoing medical research. Currently, a lot of medical professionals do not know how to properly diagnose and account for disease in queer individuals(especially trans individuals) because not much work has been done to account for these populations. When gender nonconforming groups do not have much representation in medical research, it can be dangerous for them to accept medical treatments/antibiotics.

How we Built it Data Collection/Web Scraping Went to the UCLA Health Clinical Trials and CHLA trials and filtered by 5 medical conditions for the purposes of the example: diabetes, asthma, Alzheimer’s, Mental Health, and Cancer Scraped the title study, description, researcher name, age group, gender. Also added location of hospital & medical condition in database. Used google sheets IMPORTXML function to go through the html/css code to scrape this specific function, then imported the csv into Velo This was definitely a learning experience. We had to look through all the divs and pinpoint the exact location each item we wanted to scrape -> hopefully using python selenium in the future would help us pool more entries Website Building There are 2 main parts to the website: Finding research opportunities: allows for Queer people to find specific research opportunities that they can filter based on location of hospital, age, gender identity, and their medical condition Had to connect each input as a “filter” to the database One issue we had was for options in the dropdown for medical condition, often two “diabetes” options, and upon further investigation, this was because in the database, there was a space after one of the diabetes entries, causing it to register as a separate title Allowing researchers to upload their opportunities: We essentially collected all the entries that the researcher inputted and then added them to the database. UI/UX Design We drew both the logo and page title. We also choose a light blue theme to symbolize a cool and calming
We also added a page navigation bar.

Was your team methodical and collaborative in your hacking process? Did your team overcome any obstacles or major goal changes during the hacking? We had to come up with many drafts of what our website was going to look like, we first drew rough designs of the website and what features we wanted, it was through sketching on paper that we decided to include the search features where individuals could specify the hospital, their age, and the medical condition they were interested in. A notable obstacle we encountered during our hacking process was how to go about the web scraping to get the trials to show up when the user searched for them. We had to use google sheets and try out a bunch of different commands until we found a way to display the article name and descriptions to the site. What technologies did our team leverage? Velo by wix, google sheets IMPORT functions

Did the team explore any new application domain we weren't familiar with before? We used Velo by wix which was a medium that we did not have a lot of experience with, we also learned how to use IMPORTXML to do data scraping on google sheets. which is a form of data collection, to get the local trials to show up on our website when the user tries to find opportunities.

Was the team methodical/creative in the hacking process, and major obstacles? Did team put thought into UI and what accessibility considerations did you make

How relevant and creative was our project: We thought this would be a method to improve current research to be more inclusive, specifically pertaining to LQBTQA+ groups. When researching, we say that there exists resources for LGBTQA+ people to become a patient in various hospitals, for example Fenway Health and UCSF LGBT Health website, and there also exists LGBT Healthlink, which connects public health and the queer community by trying to eliminate disparities. However, there lacked a centralized website for the queer community to specifically find all ongoing clinical trials. Also, opening our site to researchers who want to represent marginalized communities could also help them to connect to sexual minorities who are willing and able to take part in their trails.

Did your team put thought into the user experience? What accessibility considerations did you make? We put a lot of thought into our UI/UX Design, we drew both the logo and page title. We also choose a light blue theme to symbolize a cool and calming. We also added a page navigation bar so that the user could easily switch between pages(looking for research opportunities or wanting to submit a form). We took into consideration the different types of individuals that might be interested in getting involved in research by adding search filters(gender identity, age and location).