Interviewing, Designing, and Coding: The Development of the AccessiHealth App

A problem afflicting multiple different communities—primarily those that are historically disadvantaged—requires multiple forms of output to come to a solution that will maximize effectiveness. Our team primarily consists of students who came from immigrant communities so we personally experienced all different types of disparities when it came to the healthcare system; however, this problem extends further than just our group of 8 passionate students, we needed to think bigger.

We were introduced to the principle of Human Centered Design. In brevity, it focuses on empathizing with the target audience, using their ideas and input to formulate our next steps, producing a plethora of prototypes to be critiques, then finally releasing our product out into the communities we want to help. We had already identified the primary audience we were working for and empathy was something we were overflowing with, now it was time to get help from our audience. Since we are currently in the unprecedented times of COVID, we were unable to go around mass interviewing people so we had to get creative. Since we are from all different types of backgrounds and all different places of Southern California, we felt we had a diverse enough set of interview answers to at least start small—the greatest solutions start with the smallest steps.

Our interviews yielded patterns of problems (and potential solutions) that we had already thought of as well as new ones we hadn't imagined. The main ones we picked up on are language barriers causing an inability to receive adequate care, a lack of trust between doctor and patient due to a multitude of factors, and many more. So when it comes to the solution, we looked to the future: technology. With smartphones becoming almost a necessity for day-to-day life in America, we felt it was the best medium to help deliver our idea to our communities. With the most common operating system being iOS, we decided we could start with building an iPhone app to do what we needed; hopefully, we can expand this to other mediums as well. With the help of my Computer Science teacher (not affiliated with this project), I was introduced to the development tool Xcode to help at least build a working prototype since we currently don’t have the monetary funds to develop a working, HIPAA compliant application.

Being that our team consists of some of the hardest working high school students, we may be busy with school coursework, extracurriculars, and more; however, we hope to show you blog followers along the way our progress and perhaps take in some of your output. We hope to not disappoint!