Pink Ribbons

A mobile application that supports breast cancer preventive care and makes it more accessible for women of color.

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Inspiration

After looking through our research, there are many challenges that prevent women of color from receiving breast cancer preventive care and treatment. For example, not having insurance, concern about the cost, transportation problems and location, language barrier, and lack of educational resources. It's very surprising to learn that some of them don't even know that breast cancer is preventable and treatable.

What it does

A mobile application to make breast cancer preventive care accessible for everyone, especially women of color and minority groups of people – uninsured, low-income, people with language barriers.

How this application works

Our mobile application consists of four main features

Search – Find preventive care services, hospitals, organizations in the area that support breast cancer. To make it more accessible, users can use the filter function to select a doctor with a preferred gender, race, language, and see the estimated fee for the services before making a decision.

Resources – We provide accessible resources for breast cancer preventive care, including a list of non-profit organizations that supports women of color, a community of app users and health professionals, useful articles, other applications related to breast cancer, podcasts, and financial help guidelines for low-income women.

Schedule – See the upcoming events, appointments to support timely follow-up Profile – User’s profile with information about healthcare provider, primary care doctor, past appointments, treatment history, and annual test results.

How we built it

The GitHub framework uses Android Studio and Java, and we planned to add the following API’s within the app to go along with the info. Through our research, we found various APIs which could be used for the App. We narrowed them down to Zocdocs API, Google Calendar Events API, and Betterdoctor API.

How each API works:

-The Zocdoc API connects patients with their ideal medical provider, through various filters on the search bar, such as symptoms, doctors’ names, specialty, along with their location and insurance information. Each search result is based on the patient’s data. Some of the metrics include visit reason, Insurance network, Location, and Appointment availability.

-The Betterdoctor API provides comprehensive physician and practice data which provides a variety of various documentation for various search entries. With the API, we can do a doctor’s search, description, practice, specialty, list of conditions, record search, insurance provider and plans, and API Health check functionality.

-The Google Calendar Events API can assist with appointments, and event planning, as well as keeping track of different tasks throughout the day/week/month. We thought it would complement appointments with the doctors, different events, and the community aspect that we wanted to provide with the app.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges with timezone, coding, deciding what would be the best suggestion (since there are many apps available on the market already, we wanted to focus on providing additional support with reliable and accurate information by connecting users with information that is medically reliable and allowing this patron to provide education and actual advice and community of people with this.

In terms of UX research, it was difficult to find target users for interviews (women of color without health insurance, age 40+), so we need to rely on a lot of secondary research.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of what we were able to do within the given time frame, and we are sure that we can create an even better app if we were able to collaborate with McKesson! We are proud of the prototype, and the research we conducted (with 10 people) as well as the plan we produced for this hackathon. We believe that the vision and our mission addresses multiple problems, and through our research, with people who have breast cancer, we have heard positive reactions to our app. We believe that the ideation and planning have been a positive process and we believe that our app could make a genuinely positive impact on those with breast cancer, and also address and promote prevention for the women of color.

What we learned

We learned that in addition to the health perspective, the community aspect is very important. It’s important for those women of color with breast cancer to feel like they have someone who can understand what they are going through, and that they are able to have strong support systems. That’s why we integrated a community feature and aimed to provide additional resources for organizations and programs that can provide support to those with breast cancer. We also have a strong respect for those who have it or who have had it, and in doing the research and conducting interviews, we have a stronger appreciation for the courage, strength, and the stories that each individual has. We hoped that we were able to provide a platform to uplift and empower these individuals to be active in their battle against breast cancer, and to educate individuals about the importance of health and wellness in daily life.

What's next for Pink Ribbons

We would have loved to finish the app and add additional features to increase accessibility and etc., In the future, we could reach the market by partnering with organizations, screening centers, hospitals, and low-cost preventive programs to promote the application and streamline the process of searching and making appointments.

To scale the app, we could:

  • Do more research with larger groups of women of color, and working on interactions that can promote community.
  • Include personal trainers or direct contacts with qualified specialists in various fields, such as nutritionists, counselors, therapists, and automating this if possible to support more accessible preventive care.
  • Develop a “Resources” feature to be crowdsourced by the users, and provide an offline version so users can access resources without wifi.
  • Partner with other breast cancer crowdfunding projects for “Financial Help Guidelines”

To Improve Accessibility, we can consider:

  • Integrating Text to Audio Option in-app to help people with disabilities access app, dark mode, and light mode to increase visual readability (especially for women over 40 years old).
  • Integrating other Languages through Translation API’s and other API’s to reach minority groups with different languages spoken.
  • Making app free, or if changes are needed, offering discounted rates to those with financial barriers or partner with non-profit organizations.
  • Integrating online desktop version that can also be accessed, synchronously with app
  • Testing and iterating UI/UX Design per the feedback received.
  • Adding capability to filter and search for apps, and desktop sites that can provide convenience for women with breast cancer

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