Saguaro Link (Non-Profit Track 5)

Saguaro Link: Daily health logs earn Banner Bucks for grocery and RX discounts. We turn streaks into essentials, bridging the gap for Arizona patients. Empowering healthy habits one log at a time.

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Inspiration

When thinking about the issues that patients in rural Arizona face we focused on incentivizing health. However managing a chronic condition like diabetes isn't just a medical challenge it's a financial one. Lots of families are forced to choose between paying for out-of-pocket prescription costs or buying groceries. We wanted to build a bridge between these daily struggles and clinical health goals. Saguaro Link was inspired by the idea that healthy habits shouldn't just be a medical requirement; they should be a pathway to financial relief.

What it does

Saguaro Link focuses on making an incentive driven health platform with the Banner Health ecosystem. The app focuses on one simple thing that has a huge impact behavior: consistent daily data logging. * The Reward Engine: Patients earn "Banner Bucks" for every day they log their health data (e.g., glucose levels or blood pressure).

  • The Streak Multiplier: To encourage long-term habit formation, maintaining a streak increases the rate of rewards.

  • Real-World Impact: These Banner Bucks are redeemable for discounts on out-of-pocket prescription costs at Banner pharmacies and grocery credits to help lower the monthly food bill.

How we built it

We focused on creating a robust backend "Reward Logic Engine."

Backend: Built with Java and Spring Boot, utilizing a custom streak-tracking algorithm that manages user "wallets" and reward tiers.

Database: Used PostgreSQL to securely store user logs and transaction history for Banner Bucks.

Authentication: Integrated Auth0 to ensure patient data remains secure and private.

Frontend: Developed a mobile-first interface designed for accessibility and ease of use, ensuring that "logging" takes less than 30 seconds.

Challenges we ran into

Towards the end of the hack, we had an issue with our GitHub management, we had kept the wrong changes during a merge. The rest of this project was relatively smooth sailing for us, we ran into some minor problems setting up the database but we were able to collaborate and fix these problems as a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is very proud that we were able to get our project functioning by the deadline. There were times throughout the day when we were worried that we had been too ambitious in the beginning and would not be able to implement everything. There were a few initial ideas that had to get discarded but we were able to successfully implement the main functionalities we had in mind.

What we learned

In this project, we learned a lot about various technologies ranging from PostgreSQL databases to ElevenLab AI text to speech. We learned how to quickly plan a project from start to finish and realized that spending extra time to plan in the beginning and break the work into phases was invaluable so that we practiced incremental development. We

What's next for Saguaro Link

The next step for Saguaro Link is to create a way to run the app locally without requiring internet access. We would like to implement Twilio in the future so that patients could easily send the data to their healthcare providers via systems like sms or email whenever they can get internet our cellular access. We would also like to expand this app to include more diseases, and have more focused questions in the daily check in page.

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