Helping Chicago find vaccines during a health emergency. Built and launched in 24 hours.
Chicago.care helped Chicago residents find monkeypox vaccines and providers during the 2022 outbreak. It pulled verified locations, availability, and referral requirements into one fast, mobile-first resource.
Supply was scarce, the rules changed weekly, and no single place told people where to actually get a vaccine. Getting trustworthy information to at-risk residents fast affected who got protected. So I shipped the first version in a day.
Timeline
August 2022
Built and launched in a day
First commit to launch in ten commits: a map of every provider giving the monkeypox vaccine, with hours, phone, walk-in versus appointment, referral rules, and the city's eligibility guidance, all curated by hand.
- Map centered on your location
- Hours with open and closed state
- Walk-in versus appointment and referral requirements
- Report inaccurate info from any listing
August 2022
Scaling with the traffic
Added geolocation, caching, a referral controller, nearby care centers, and visitor ratings. The serverless backend on AWS scaled with the traffic, holding about 1,000 sessions a minute at peak.
August 2022
NBC 5
Emailed thirty Chicago reporters and got one reply. The NBC 5 segment ran on the 4, 5, 6, and 10 pm news and again the next morning. The interview is the video above.
Google Analytics after the 10 pm segment: 65 people on the site in thirty minutes, three quarters of them on phones, most of them on the map. October 2022
Appointments
V2 added search, vaccines listed per location, upcoming appointment slots, mobile booking, dark mode, and Walgreens hours. When the outbreak wound down in October, the site broadened into a general care finder with over 500 providers.
April 2023
Dotcare
Rebuilt on the App Router with in-app appointment scheduling, insurance plans, and a per-city microsite template for 27 .care cities, plus pages for providers and investors.
The care finder today: same-day appointments across Chicago.
Impact
- Helped thousands of residents find vaccine providers during the outbreak.
- Featured on NBC 5 Chicago across six newscasts.
- Built integrations with national urgent care networks to streamline appointment discovery.
My role
Founder and sole engineer: product design, infrastructure, backend APIs, the front end, the data curation, and the press outreach.
- Next.js
- API Gateway
- AWS Fargate
- AWS Lambda
- CloudFormation
- MongoDB