Pharmfinder

Pharmfinder improves user experience by having all the medical service providers in one place, thereby reducing the number of steps people need to keep track of their health.

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Inspiration

Inspired by the TELUS challenge of HackED, Team Weezer looked to make searching for healthcare services within Edmonton more accessible.

What it does

Pharmfinder is a web application that lets the user search for a healthcare service (ie. first aid, medication review, vaccinations, etc.). The search runs through our external database and displays which pharmacies within Edmonton provide the healthcare service being searched for. The information displayed includes the name of the pharmacy, its address, and links to a list of the services provided and its location on Google Maps.

How We Built It

We entered data from all the pharmacies in Edmonton into an external database using MySQL. Using Python and Flask, we developed our project's back-end to display our data as a web application. The front-end of our project was created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges We Ran Into

Initially, we looked to store the inventory of all the Edmonton pharmacies, allowing the user to search for a specific medication. Following a similar process as our current Pharmfinder but instead of searching for a healthcare service, they could search for a medication. This would've displayed the pharmacies that had the medication in stock. However, we ran into two major problems. First, only the pharmacies within a chain store (ie. Shoppers, Rexall, etc.) had any inventory information, and second, these pharmacies only displayed over-the-counter medicine.
Another challenge we faced was having to switch our front-end development from Reactjs back to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We found that we were trying to learn too much with too little time while attempting to implement our front-end with Reactjs. We had little experience with JavaScript, making Reactjs almost impossible to use.

Accomplishments and What We Learned

There were countless times throughout the project when our team had to pivot to another idea, such as pivoting from using Reactjs to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, or having to pivot our entire concept from medication search to healthcare service search. These situations showcased our ability to come up with alternate solutions on the spot, which is something we're quite proud of.
For the most part, our team had little experience in front-end development. Many hours of HackED were spent learning about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Reactjs, and many more hours were spent debugging code we thought would work. Regardless of these challenges, our team showed how flexible we could be.

What's Next for Pharmfinder

Pharmfinder will look to allow users to search for specific medications as we intended in our initial idea. We plan to implement this by allowing pharmacies to log in and select their inventory. This information gives us the data needed to implement medication searches in Pharmfinder.

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