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#OperationMAD Winner: Children’s Cancer Connection

Drum roll, please. The winner of the Operation: Make a Difference contest is Children’s Cancer Connection.

Woohoo! Operation: Make a Difference Winner, Children's Cancer Connection The Children’s Cancer Connection, based in Des Moines, Iowa, provides programs and services to children battling childhood cancer and their families. They rallied their constituents to collect a record-high of 1,037 votes. (Ok, yes, it’s the first year, but it’s a record nonetheless and they deserve acknowledgement.)

The project they submitted is an electronic platform to replace the hard-copy binders they provide to each child and family. We’ll let them explain in their own words:

Children's Cancer Connection provides a resource kit for every child affected by childhood cancer who is living, treated, or diagnosed in the state of Iowa and their family.  In this resource kit, a treatment binder can be found with a plethora of resources, educational materials, and calendars to assist families while they are on their journey with childhood cancer.  It is Children's Cancer Connection goal to make the treatment binder more accessible to families through the use of an application for smartphone and tablet users. 

Children's Cancer Connection is there for The Entire Family...The Entire Journey.

Initially, the goal of the platform is to help parents of kids diagnosed with cancer manage the overwhelming amount of information thrown at them and have it be available to them anywhere via a mobile device. The platform will allow parents to manage doctors, nurses, appointments, lab results, medications, treatments, allergies, ER visits, and more digitally, as well as access medical terminology and resources quickly.

After the minimum viable product (MVP) is developed and released, the plan is to continue to build and expand the platform to add more and more value for families of children with cancer.

We’ll build the platform as a responsive HTML5 app, so it’s accessible on all devices (desktops, smartphones, and tablets) via a browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.). We’re going to do some prep work ahead of time, but the bulk of the development will be on March 8—hack-a-thon style.

Stay tuned for more details on the process and project!