UC Ship Finder

Finding healthcare providers shouldn't be a hassle—with UC Ship Finder, you'll get connected with a provider that will accept your UC Ship insurance in less than two clicks! No stress, no confusion.

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Inspiration

Students at UCSB who have UC Ship coverage express a common complaint: getting connected with a healthcare provider is often not an easy or smooth process. From long waiting periods, endlessly clicking through reddit, or an undesired trip to the Student Health Center, over 95 interviewed students come to the same conclusion.

Getting access to a provider should be intuitive and quick for all students, so our team decided to create a tool that'd do just that.

What it does

With UC Ship Finder, students can navigate through a database of healthcare providers verified to be covered by UC Ship (according to official provider records) and get in contact in just two clicks or less. Students can select from a database of providers in Primary Care, Urgent Care, Dentistry, Optometry, Mental Health. For users unsure of what services are most appropriate for them, we offer the ability to type concerns directly and match them with right healthcare provider databases.

We understand that transportation and distance from healthcare services deters many students from continuing their search for an appointment, and that for many students, transitioning into college involves getting set up with a healthcare provider on their own for the very first time. That's why students can filter through providers on the basis of rating, proximity to the student and to UCSB, and much more to come.

UC Ship Finder is here to support students' health journey by making the search for the right provider hassle-free, accessible, and quick, as healthcare should be.

How we built it

UC Ship Finder's front-end uses HTML and JavaScript. Our backend is programmed in Python and uses OpenAI GPT power analyze user responses and match them with the right healthcare services. We also utilize Google's Maps API to provide access to the closest providers with high ratings.

We initially had issues with geocoding health providers' addresses and accurately displaying distances. In searching for API's, our team also struggled with obtaining API keys that significantly simplified our workflow and thus resorted to manually scraping reliable data off databases that came directly from Anthem Blue Cross and Delta Dental to name a few.

Our team is proud to have developed a front-end that is both modern, sleek, and intuitively delivers our service despite our collectively low experience in front-end development. Accurately labeling and filtering our data was also tough and called for extensive manual labor; getting through this portion of our project was a significant step forward and inspired us to deliver the best product we could.

What's next for UC Ship Finder?

Our team interviewed over 95 UCSB students prior to the development of our project and those who held a UC Ship membership expressed that our tool would've saved them many hours of research, back-and-forth emails, and long trips to the health office. UC Ship Finder has the potential to tie the severed connection between students and UC Ship healthcare providers at several UC Campuses, which is what we hope to expand towards in the next year. From there, we hope to scale our service to universities across the nation in our mission to make healthcare truly accessible to all students.

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