GoodRx Hackathon 2020: Addressing Racial Injustice and Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Healthcare

In response to recent events highlighting the racial injustice inflicting people of color in the United States, GoodRx leadership challenged us to help address these inequities in the context of healthcare. This challenge came in the form of a hackathon, a competition where teams provide potential solutions to a problem using computer engineering and other collaborative resources. 

Although I wasn’t exactly sure what a hackathon would entail, it was an experience I will never forget. I was lucky enough to be on the team that eventually won, but all teams that participated had thoughtful and inspiring ideas to improve healthcare in some way. Here was my experience.

The ground rules 

The theme of the hackathon was DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion), and the objective was to create a project that addresses DEI in healthcare. Individuals within GoodRx submitted ideas for projects, and the final list was narrowed down to 11 project ideas. We were then encouraged to sign up for projects that interested us.

Teams were given 2 days to work on their projects. The team that proposed the most innovative way to improve diversity, equality, and inclusion in healthcare using our company’s resources would be declared the winner. The prize was getting 2 weeks as a team to work on their project before the end of the year (to get the project completely functional and operating) and to choose a charity that would receive a gift of $10,000 from GoodRx.

Team Health Center

I was part of Team Health Center, where we attempted to build a case for a resource on the GoodRx website that gave people the ability to search for low-cost health centers near them. 

At first, it  started out as a conversation I had with a coworker, Ameno Osman, about how GoodRx could expand our outreach efforts in underserved communities. This led to a hackathon project idea aimed at helping people in underserved communities find options for healthcare. The idea was simple: create a search tool for patients to find a low-cost health clinic near them. 

At the same time, another one of my coworkers, Dr. Shuo Song, had a similar hackathon idea but one that was focused on HRSA (Health Resources and Services Administration) health centers, community-based health centers funded by the federal government that must accept Medicare and Medicaid, and provide a sliding scale fee system based on patients’ ability to pay. He had previously worked at one of these health centers and knew how helpful they were at providing low-cost care to the underserved. He also knew that they had a database that we could access that contained location information for all HRSA health centers in the U.S. We decided to combine efforts as our ideas were so similar. 

We split our team into two workstreams: grassroots data enrichment, and product, design, and engineering. The grassroots group organized how we were going to narrow down which zip codes to focus on and then collected low-cost clinic data from those areas. Since data on low-cost clinics hasn’t been pooled into a shared resource yet, our team manually called 53 clinics to find out how much primary care visits would cost for patients living at 100% and 200% of the federal poverty level. In addition, data was also collected on languages offered by staff at each clinic, and if they helped patients sign up for government programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). 

The product, design, and engineering group focused on building the webpage where our search tool would live, making sure it was accessible on desktop computers, and Android and iOS mobile devices. Our backend engineers used HRSA’s raw health center data and data collected from the grassroots workstream efforts to build a database our search tool could pull from when users performed a search. This allowed our frontend engineers to group clinics by specific zip codes and power a map view where users could see where clinics were located in their neighborhood.  Our iOS and Android engineers also used what our backend engineers created to customize features for the mobile versions. Last but not least, our team’s designer defined the user interactions and features that would help guide patients as they searched for low-cost clinics with our tool.

At the end of the 2 days, we had a prototype of our search tool that worked on desktop and mobile platforms. Along with all the other hackathon teams, we presented our idea to the company — and I’m thrilled that we were selected as the winning team. Once this feature is built out, patients will be able to find low-cost clinics by entering their zip code into the search tool, which will return a map view of available clinics in their area.

Paying it forward

As the winners, we were granted the opportunity to choose a charity to donate $10,000 to on behalf of GoodRx. We chose RIP Medical Debt, which relieves medical debt for people all across the country. For every $100 that is donated to the organization, they forgive $10,000 in medical debt. For the $10,000 that GoodRx will donate, RIP Medical Debt will forgive $1,000,000 worth of medical debt. 

GoodRx has worked with this charity before and has previously donated to them. We chose this charity knowing that medical debt largely burdens the most vulnerable people in our society, especially people of color and those who belong to other minority groups. Since the hackathon was a challenge to address inequities in healthcare, it was important to us to donate to a charity that is trying to improve the lives of those who could not afford their medical care and are now feeling the weight of that cost compound. 

– – –

Our team’s mission began with the belief that GoodRx is well-positioned to help all Americans find affordable healthcare, regardless of their income. There will now be a resource available for users to find free and low-cost health centers near them. Our hope is that this will allow more people to get the healthcare they need and ultimately help make it so that income is not a determining factor for how healthy or ill a person may be.