What inspired
Covid vaccine distribution in California is at an all-time high and we saw a problem in which the way they are distributed. One of our team members' father works in the medical industry and has experienced the shortcomings first hand of the current vaccine distribution. He inspired us to find a solution that would help optimize this process.
What it does
Our app is able to take a waitlist of vaccine recipients and sort them in a way that is effective. We are using data from the California Office of Health Hazard Assessment to find people in disadvantaged communities and prioritize their vaccinations first. This takes into consideration age, zip code, health conditions which in turn gives them a score on urgency.
How we Built it
We built our app using Django and a custom data processing algorithm that is able to sort a waitlist of people into an optimized vaccine rollout distribution. This takes an input of a CSV file and gives the user an output of a reordered list.
Challenges we ran into
In initial design and prototyping, we were initially using JavaScript, this language was not easily able to sort the data. This was fixed when we started using Python with Pandas, not only was this much easier but more powerful. We also ran into an issue of deploying our website, we were unable to deploy it due to internal bugs we did not have time to fix, but this gave us the opportunity to experiment with docker and how we can containerize our application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the algorithm built and our ability to learn Django only having worked with JavaScript frameworks but our biggest accomplishment was when we download the first sorted list and saw its capability. We were excited to add new features and brainstormed ideas in which this can grow and help people.
What we learned
We learned a new framework Django and experimented in Python in ways we have never done before. We also have experimented with Docker containers to run virtual environments to test the features of our app.
What's next for OptiVax
We are going to continue working on this project and host its functions on a cloud website for people to use. We will also connect with local hospitals and vaccine distribution centers to apply our website services to best fit their needs.
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