Inspired by our community, we created a project to offer a guide to low-income minorities of NYC, such as us, an easily accessible and easy to use resource to health care services. With a burning passion and desire to help others, our team worked hard to provide an informative and trustworthy platform. Our website gives users the ability to freely fill out a Medicaid form to check for eligibility, a statistical analysis of health facilities in NYC, and a search for local health facilities on an interactive map. Our project is a website designed with multiple web pages with descriptions on how to navigate the page. We used numerous outside sources for the aesthetics of our website and read various documentations for the APIs that we used.
Throughout our project we faced many challenges, both within and outside of coding. One of our biggest challenges was facing a WiFi Outage. one of our team members was facing a WiFi outage in her neighborhood causing her to be unable to work on her part of the project. However, as a team, we were able to find ways to work around the outage and still get her input. Additionally, we faced challenges in getting the charts on our page to display. We had to spend a while debugging our code, until finally the charts on our graphs page were visible. It is also important to mention, as high school students we have a limited experience with coding and thus could not make more complex programs. Lastly, since we found this hackathon later on. We were limited in time. With barely a week to start our project, we had to balance time between our own responsibilities and the project we were making. This caused us to create a less glamorous version of our idea and it limited our resources.
An accomplishment that we are most proud of is working successfully as a team to create a functional and applicable website that low-income minorities can use without difficulty. We learned that ethnic minorities are less likely than whites to receive health services, which causes minorities to have worse health outcomes. Factors such as distrust, racism, and bias against minorities contribute to this disparity. We realized that this a big issue in society that needs to be brought to attention.
In the future, we would love to make our website globally available and continue to make enhancements. As minorities seem to be on the lower end of the demographics using the health care system, we would like to implement multiple language accessibility and make our website culturally friendly.
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