MelaHealth

MelaHealth is a platform for young black women to access healthcare resources and get their questions answered by professionals.

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Inspiration 🌎

In the past year, nearly one-third of African American women reported that they delayed or forwent needed healthcare. In addition to this, African American women are more likely to have a physical condition that limits routine activities such as participating in school or work or conducting daily housework. After looking into these statistics and other disparities in the healthcare system, we knew that something needed to be done to increase access to healthcare for these women, especially during a pandemic when mistrust in the healthcare system is high.

What it does 📲

MelaHealth is a platform for young black women to access necessary healthcare resources, including information on reproductive health, diseases that primarily affect black people, and a search engines that finds black doctors based on zip-code.

How we built it 💪

We created a website using Flask after prototyping it on Figma. The front-end of our webpages use HTML and CSS while the back-end uses Python and Google Cloud (Google Maps Javascript API and Google Maps Geocoding API). We also created domains for our project and team (melahealth.tech and splicegirls.tech) using Domain.com.

Challenges we ran into 🤔

We ran into many challenges during this process, but we were able to work through them very well as a team. One of the biggest challenges was learning the new technologies for this project. Luckily, we utilized the amazing mentors of this hackathon to learn how to use Flask, Google Maps API, HTML, and much more. Another challenged we faced was one of our team members being unable to participate in the hackathon. However, we were able to make a lot of progress with just a team of three and created something we couldn't have done individually.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😺

We're proud that we could create such a full-fledged website using Flask in just a couple dozen hours. We're also proud of being able to figure out Google Maps API to render maps using zip-codes. We're also proud of our communication and collaboration as a team remotely.

What we learned ✅

In addition to the technical skills we learned, we learned how to ask for help when we need it, how to successfully collaborate in an online setting, and how to be professional Googlers (pretty much, anyways...).

What's next for MelaHealth 💘

In the future, we would love to add a text messaging feature where users can receive mental health tips each week. We also are interested in adding a blog feature where users and professionals can share their insight and learn from each other. Lastly, we would like to find a dataset of black doctors by zip-code and incorporate it into our map feature to display black doctors based on users' zip-codes.

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