UCSF Doctors Academy Student Tracker

Inspiration

The students who have completed the doctors academy program and go onto health professions are our inspiration. They are our future doctors. As we navigate through this pandemic, the need for healthcare professionals is even greater - especially for our underserved populations. The Doctors Academy has three sites in the Central Valley of California and focuses on supporting students with academic enrichment, clinical experience and college readiness so that they are prepared to enter college as a pre-health major.

This short video will give you a glimpse into the impact our program has on students: https://youtu.be/zxXtlBih144

What it does

As a result of COVID-19, schools and instructional delivery will look very different. There are many unknowns, like how prepared are teachers to teach in this virtual environment? How will students be supported academically to pursue college and careers? This is why we decided to develop the Doctors Academy Student Tracker. The DAStudentTracker will allow our academic program coordinators to track students' academic progress, setup intervention plans, and provides a way to directly communicate with students and parents on what is needed to stay on track towards college readiness.

How I built it

Gordon and Sarah built the front end of this tool using the Flask framework and SQLAlchemy library in Python, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. For the back end database they used MySQL.

Challenges I ran into

The biggest challenge we are running into is how to host what was developed. The current UCSF IT infrastructure has many security requirements and we have had multiple meetings during the duration of the Hackathon, trying to figure out how we'll actually be able to access the student tracker.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am most proud of how quickly Gordon and Sarah worked at the development of this student tracker. At the start of the hackathon, they both shared that they are novices, but willing to learn and help with our project. Through their research, they quickly agreed upon the use of Python and SQL - and got right to work. Within a few days, the DAStudentTracker came to life and we were able to continue through a storyboarding process to build out the functionality.

What I learned

I learned that the only way an idea could come to life is if you put it out there for others to support. Having never done any web development before, Gordon and Sarah were able to learn a lot about the process of developing and deploying web applications. While our project wasn't the most technical, we believe it could have a tremendous impact on the future of our healthcare workforce.

What's next for UCSF Doctors Academy Student Tracker

We need to determine how to continue funding the next phase of development, which would include creating a messaging tool within the tracker, as well as building out the larger database. Similar to Electronic Medical Records, we believe there is a market for this type of tool, especially as more health pathway programs move toward a virtual mode of instruction.