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Horse Index — Centralized Care Management for Retirement Home for Horses

Inspiration

Retirement Home for Horses manages hundreds of retired horses, each with unique medical histories, treatments, and daily care needs.

Much of this information currently lives across spreadsheets, folders, and handwritten records, which makes tracking care difficult and time-consuming for caregivers.

We were inspired to build Horse Index to centralize all of this data into one system so caregivers can spend less time managing information and more time caring for horses.

What it does

Horse Index is a centralized web application designed to help manage care for retired horses.

The platform allows caregivers and administrators to:

View and manage individual horse profiles
Track medical conditions, treatments, and observations
Store documents and images related to each horse
Maintain an audit trail of changes for accountability

All horse-related information is organized in one place, improving consistency, accuracy, and accessibility.

How we built it

We built Horse Index using a modern web stack with a backend API connected to a PostgreSQL database.

Supabase was used to manage the database and authentication layer, while the backend exposes REST endpoints for managing horses, treatments, observations, and documents.

Docker was used to containerize the application, allowing for consistent development and deployment across environments. The frontend consumes these APIs to display and update real-time data through a clean and intuitive interface.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was transforming real-world data that existed in spreadsheets into a structured relational database while preserving data integrity.

We also needed to carefully design relationships between horses, treatments, observations, documents, and audit logs to ensure the system could scale and remain maintainable.

Coordinating development across a team during a time-constrained hackathon required clear communication and prioritization of core features.

Accomplishments we’re proud of

We’re proud that we:

Successfully modeled a real nonprofit’s workflow into a working system
Migrated real horse data into a structured database
Built a functional end-to-end application under hackathon constraints
Created a solid foundation that can be expanded beyond the event

What we learned

Through this project, we learned how to translate real-world problems into technical solutions, design relational databases, and work effectively as a team under pressure.

We also gained valuable experience balancing technical implementation with usability and real-world impact.