Week 3: Maine to Mexico: Every clinic in the country

Hi everyone!

This week was literally just online research. Over 25 hours of it. I mapped almost every single mobile clinic in the country. Well, first, I just did all of the ones in a 2.5 hour radius of my research site. That included different places like San Francisco, San Mateo, Central Valley, Sonoma, and Alameda. I wrote up 10 pages on the clinics located in areas like these. However, my advisor told me that all of the research that I did would only help us determine what our target population and area would be. She said that if we really wanted to successfully run a mobile clinic, we would have to look at clinics from across the country, figure out how they work, and what lessons we can learn from them. So, for the second half of the week, I mapped clinics from every US state(with a lot being in Boston, MA).

There was this link online that I found called a Mobile health map, and this is basically a map of the US on which all mobile clinics can register their location so if someone wants to see any statistics about the clinic, they can find them. There are about 700 clinics on this map alone but just so many more that are not registered on the map. If you look it up and click on any orange dot, it will reveal the name of the clinic, the contact information, a web link(most had none so I had to hunt for them on my own), and a general service they provide. I took the name of each clinic, put it into google, and then researched each one and wrote up all the services they have, their target population, their schedule of operation, their area of operation, and any background, stats, and lessons learned from each clinic. It was definitely very research heavy week, and at the end of it all, I have a general idea of the areas that I want to target, but nothing is really set in stone.

By the end of this new week, I’ll have an executive summary to present to the university, a 6 second, 10 minute, and 30 minute presentation for the companies that will be our source of funding, and interview questions for a focus group that we will be conducting in Sonoma, Santa Clara, and a few other counties nearby. Focus Group: We want to talk to the locals in the area to figure out what kinds of services they would need and what the gap looks like in each of these areas.

Anyways, that you for reading about my project!