MEDiverse

providing you with great "out"patient care, one doctor at a time!

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Inspiration

Have you ever had a bad experience at the doctor's office or at your local clinic?

If the answer is yes, you have something in common with members of the LGBTQ+ community; it is well-documented that queer individuals are more likely to experience barriers to healthcare and health equity due to factors such as discrimination and systemic difficulties, even in fairly progressive countries such as Canada. Additionally, there is often no good way to tell if a healthcare provider is indeed inclusive and accepting of LGBTQ+ patients, even if they say so outright, without actually dealing with them in person; incidents of trans- and homophobia as well as general disrespect and discrimination are still occurring, and the patients that do choose to take a chance on some doctors despite not knowing their stance on diversity and inclusion still suffer from unpleasant experiences despite exercising due caution.

With that being said...

Welcome to the MEDiverse!

What it does

MEDiverse is a website that allows patients to look up LGBTQ+-friendly healthcare providers at the click of a button. What makes it unique, however, is that it runs entirely on user-provided reviews; doctors are rated according to the user reviews saved to the database. It is easy for a clinic to proclaim that they are inclusive and welcoming, but patients with less than stellar experiences beg to differ; building a database of doctors and clinics that is based on what patients have to say about their personal experiences with healthcare providers thus ensures a more accurate picture of which medical establishments are truly inclusive and welcoming. MEDiverse also lets the patient search up the name of a doctor they are looking into in order to see what other patients are saying about them, allowing the patient to decide prior to booking an appointment whether a doctor is suitable for their needs or not - thus saving them the effort of a potential bad experience. Patients are also capable of filtering the database by specific tags if they are looking for certain specializations (e.g. transgender-friendly doctors).

How we built it

We built the backend in Python (plus a bit of Flask) and used HTML/CSS and some JavaScript to build the frontend. We also used Cohere's Generate AI endpoint to generate user entries for our database, and the Classify AI endpoint to organize these reviews based on whether they were positive or negative (as well as tagging them for specifics such as racial equity or providing informed consent for ease of browsing). The website also allows patients to enter reviews for doctors based on their experiences; the review is added to the database and is classified by the AI model accordingly. The website also allows the patient to search for specific doctors, or to search for doctors who (according to other users) specialize in points of interest such as being sex-positive or trans-friendly.

Challenges we ran into

We (the whole team!) are all beginners to web dev despite having some experience with Python, so there were many things that we wanted to accomplish that we simply did not have enough time to teach ourselves, but we wanted to create a working prototype of our vision all the same and feel that we were able to get it done!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We worked very hard with the time and skills that we had - one of our teammates learned how to make a website from scratch with HTML/CSS and JS, which was very cool! We also put our heads together and found a way to make something cool with our combined efforts, and we didn't end up over-promising anything with regards to our end product. We learned how to use Cohere AI endpoints for classification and generation as well, which was fun to play with and learn about!

What we learned

  • teamwork makes the dream work
  • website design is tough, but fun!
  • sometimes simple is best, especially if it means the difference between a finished and an unfinished product
  • entire cities were built on coffee and tylenol alone
  • nestea iced tea GOATed

What's next for MEDiverse

Full frontend and backend integration!!!!!

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