Community Clinic and Services Finder

Motivation

This app was originally developed as a simple “clinic finder” for the student-initiated project APA Health CARE at UCLA, in early March 2012. At that time, the “clinic finder” app was redundant with many of APA Health CARE’s in-house referral services, and was typically used for clients from outside the Los Angeles County. As this need was fulfilled, I suspended development of the “clinic finder” app.

As APA Health CARE’s priorities changed over 2012, however, it became clear that a more comprehensive clinical and social services referral locator was needed. This forms the basic motivation for this project, and I reactivated this project in September 2012.

I should also note that there are several other service locators online. But it didn’t seem like any of them provided what I was looking for — including well-structured data, a clean and intuitive interface, and well-designed query functions. Some sites could have one or two, but not all of these criteria. Learning and creating a webapp that fit all of my criteria provided some personal motivation.

Features (01 October 2012)

• Responsive front-end allows faster, resolution-specific rendering.
  A laptop or wi-fi might not always be available at a health fair or community event. But smartphones probably will be.
• Search by clinic name, or by geography, clinic type, and languages available.
• Data on payment methods, service provider FTE and encounters

Changelog and Notes

01 October 2012

• “Launch” of rough draft.
• Data limited to California clinics, with a focus on Los Angeles-area clinics.
• In progress: Code base rewrite to PHP (currently intended to facilitate server-side API hooks to external data sources)
• In progress: Migration from Google Fusion Tables to MySQL.
• In progress: Integration of social services data, and query capabilities.