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Improving accessibility to the reproductive healthcare industry

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Four students pose for a photo

Team members
Sahej Claire, Jenna Jung, Aishwarya Mehta, Alejandra Orozco

Faculty mentor
Prof. Markus Pelger

The organization
Innovating Education in Reproductive Health (IERH) is a program of the Bixby Center, which is part of the University of California San Francisco. IERH works to design, produce, and distribute free curricula & learning tools about sexual health, abortion, and contraception. The program works toward generating health care practitioners who provide patient-centered, evidence-based, and comprehensive sexual and reproductive healthcare free of stigma, discrimination, and coercion.

innovating education in reproductive health logo

Project description

The IERH team wanted to understand how to increase their impact as an organization. They had two main concerns related to their outreach and website experience. The first was regarding difficulty distributing their curricula and videos to the niche medical community. The second major concern was evaluating the ease of navigation on their website and the efficacy of video content.

The goal of our project was to increase outreach and improve IERH's website experience to help them close the gap in abortion education for medical students and professionals. More generally, increased visibility for the IERH website will enable IERH to educate more people about abortion and its complications, which has become of prime importance with the possible overturn of Roe v. Wade, which makes abortion a constitutional right.

Solutions

We formulated two short-term solutions and one long-term solution to address concerns highlighted by the IERH team, surveys, interviews, and Google Analytics data. As a short-term solution, we recommend that IERH changes their domain name to something containing the words “abortion” and “education.” Our second short-term solution is to implement a feedback survey to get a better understanding of who visits the site.

The long-term solution is to implement a personalized experience questionnaire, which we titled “Curated Learning Experience Tool.” This recommendation recycles the current structure of IERH's videos to spare expenses, but still offers content in a more personalized way for users based on two questions which allow for content categorization.

Techniques used

Our approach to tackling this problem involved multiple methods. To understand how users currently interact with the site, we collected insights from Google Analytics data. To understand what users want, we sent out a survey and conducted user interviews and analyzed the data using visualization tools. These methods combined allowed us to pinpoint customized recommendations for our clients at IERH.

Awards

The IERH team tied for the 2022 first place senior project, as evaluated by MS&E alumni judges.

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2022 senior projects