How a Hackathon Broke Healthcare Barriers for Houston Children
The Hacker Society has one mission: programming for a purpose by bringing together civic-minded coders to work on projects that impact the community. The all volunteer-led coding club assembled en masse to provide pro bono tech development for leading nonprofit Ronald McDonald House Charities. While the team from Poetic Systems was re-designing RMHC’s website, they noticed an antiquated system for locating the services offered. Their solution was to build a locator app, and they pitched the idea to The Hacker Society. The first project wasn’t small, even though the end users are.
An App for the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile Unit
Over 50 hackers from Houston and Austin joined forces to help RMHC of Greater Houston & Galveston in the completion of a pediatric mobile clinic locator app. The Ronald McDonald Care Mobile® unit is a state-of-the-art, fully-equipped pediatric clinic on wheels, designed to meet well-care and treatment needs of children. The Care Mobile unit is staffed by pediatricians, nurse practitioners, nurses, and medical assistants from Texas Children’s Hospitals. The app determines a person’s location and uses it to find available healthcare units in their area.
Currently, the Care Mobile serves over 2,000 un- and underinsured children annually. The app is expected to expand service reach by ten percent in the first year. Houston serves as the test market for the app with hopes of expansion. The app design is structured to scale for the other 48 Ronald McDonald Care Mobile units globally.
The team assembled at daybreak (well, almost — 8 am) to enjoy a networking breakfast from TacosAGoGo and hot coffee courtesy of local roasters, Katz Coffee, before being greeted by RMHC executive director Tanya Gee, other key board members, and event organizers. This event was sponsored by Space City JS, Poetic Systems, and Node.js Houston.
Gina Miller, cultural affairs director for Poetic Systems, introduced The Hacker Society’s foundation for philanthropy and its continued mission to make their community a better place through better products.
She then introduced Ms. Tanya Gee with RMHC to explain the impact this app would have on Houston. Ms. Gee used a recent example of a young girl whose family had just immigrated to the U.S. a few weeks ago. “Recently, our Ronald McDonald Care Mobile and its medical team from Texas Children’s Hospital were out and a recently immigrated African family saw it and stopped to ask if their child could receive treatment. The child is deaf and not able to communicate. The team went to work to help this family obtain treatment for possible restoration of hearing. The team gave the family lessons for American Sign Language and enrolled the child in school, all free of charge. The Ronald McDonald Care Mobile locator helps thousands, just like this family, find the medical help they need.”
Ms. Gee delivered a heartfelt thank you, saying, “We cannot thank the teams at Poetic Systems, Station Houston, MeteorJS, and the Houston Hacker Society enough for all they have done to enable more families to locate the medical care they need right in their own neighborhoods.”
The group broke out into smaller teams with some attending basic coding and MeteorJS crash courses. Three main classrooms were taught in cycles so that everyone could participate in the building of the final product.
Coding 101/102
Seasoned developers led a course on the basics of javascript and discussed some of its eccentricities that can be frustrating for new programmers to learn. Three teachers rotated between a beginners and an advanced room, catering pace and content topics to the ability of the participants. These classes aimed to prep new developers for app development, and provide tools and insight to those already versed in the craft.
In Meteor 101, Matthew Hager (Poetic Systems CEO) and Addison Freeman (Poetic Systems) gave an intro to the Meteor platform. They also discussed some advantages of Meteor, such as isomorphic javascript, real-time applications, and Meteor’s great community — the reasons Meteor is Poetic Systems’ platform of choice. Moreover, developers got a quick introduction to Meteor by creating a project from the ground up. They discussed some basics and reviewed Meteor’s history around how it became the popular framework it is today. There was also a quick demonstration on how versatile Meteor was and how Meteor can even be used to build a virtual reality game. In Meteor 102, Brian Scroggins, Kristy Miller, and Martin Bee (all of Poetic Systems) provided a deeper look into the framework and helped coders get set up and coding on some basic Meteor applications.
App Deploy Central, AKA The War Room
Trent Yang and Noa Iolin (Poetic Systems) spearheaded operations in the main room (dubbed ‘The War Room’) to finish building the administrative/internal-facing part of the app. This allows RMHC staff access to easily add events or make other quick changes within the platform. In addition, preparations were made to upload the app to TestFlight for the evaluation phase.
The app was successfully deployed to the App Store at the end of the Hackathon after ten full hours of furious planning, writing, and streamlining of code. The official unveiling took place on May 14th at Space City JS, a tech development conference held at TMC|x Innovation Institute.
This post originally appeared on Meteor.com
