Finding the best health insurance coverage is daunting. You want to know what options are available to you, what they offer, and which ones you can afford. Knowing if and how many doctors are available to serve your health needs under a particular insurance is important. Our web app helps you find how many doctors are covered by a particular insurance given an address and a radius.
Currently, finding what doctors are covered by your insurance takes too long. Multiple phone calls to our insurance companies or doctor's offices to confirm if they accept your coverage or reading through a long complicated member handbook is an exercise in frustration. Even when someone succeeds in getting a definitive answer, it may not be the correct one. In a study published last year, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, tried contacting all 4,754 dermatologists listed in 12 metro areas. Nearly half the names were duplicates and only about half the remaining were at the listed address, accepting the plan and offering appointments. Using BetterDoctor's data already prevents this misinformation from appearing on InsureCare.
InsureCare's clean intuitive interface that lets you filter by address and immediately see how many doctors are available under a certain insurance plan. It also lets you see the ratings of those doctors, because quality of care matters more than quantity of care.
We built a tool to help people decide what insurance provider will give them access to not only the most doctors in their area, but also the best doctors in their area.
- Python
- AJAX/JSON
- Jinja2
- D3
- BetterDoctor API
- Google Maps API
(dependencies are listed in requirements.txt)
- Clone the InsureMe repo
- Set up and activate a python virtualenv in the InsureMe directory on your computer, and install all dependencies:
virtualenv envsource env/bin/activatepip install -r requirements.txt
- You need a Google Maps API key to run this project. Once you have a key, export it into your shell env like this:
export Google_Maps_API_Key="<your key>"
- Start up the flask server:
python server.py
- Go to localhost:5000 to see the web app
Considering that you may need to see more than one type of provider depending on how complicated your healthcare needs are, InsureCare 2.0 would also show the specialties of doctors available in a particular area.
InsureCare was built during a two-day hackathon during the Integrate 2015 Conference. It won the BetterDoctor challenge and placed in the Top Five Overall. Jessica Anette Lopez, Amanda Meurer, Carolyn Lee, and Corey Shott are software engineers in San Francisco, CA.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/insurers-listings-of-in-network-doctors-often-out-of-date-1416953787