Abidi developed a mobile app to help people across the country connect with low-cost or free health care. His app, ApolloHealth, not only finds local providers but also filters to the user’s needs such as affordability, distance and type of care.
Abidi said he was inspired to create the app after reading that 27 million Americans do not have health insurance and 22.8 percent of adults older than 18 struggle to pay medical bills across the country.
“This came as somewhat of a surprise, so I wanted to do more research into the topic, and I began to understand just how complex and serious of a problem health inequity is in the United States,” Abidi said. “Many of these websites lack search functionality, and searching for these clinics can be inefficient and time consuming. So therefore, I wanted to contribute to reducing the problem of health inequity using technology.”
Abidi said he worked on ApolloHealth for more than 100 hours across four months. He built the app with Xcode, the integrated development platform for iOS, and Python scripts to extract data from health provider websites.
The app isn’t available for download quite yet, but will be open for iOS users across the nation when it goes live later this month.
Abidi’s future plans for the app include Android system capability, expanding the database to community clinics across the nation and even partnerships with federal and state governments to expand the app.
Although he’s just a freshman in high school, Abidi said he’s already looking for college programs in medicine and engineering.
“Ali did such a great job of identifying a problem, logically thinking through a solution and then actually applying it,” U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden said. “Health care is a real challenge in our district right now. Particularly up in the Eau Claire area, we had HSHS hospital system pull out, and we need to make sure that just cause we don’t live in big ol’ cities we have access to real, meaningful, good-quality health care.”
This year’s challenge winner is the second in a row for Onalaska High School. In 2023, Aditi Muduganti won for her app that helps classify Polar Ring galaxies with the help of AI.
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