Developers for Good

Organization Spotlight: Rosann of Reproductive Health Access Project

Meet Rosann Mariappuram, Program & Administrative Associate at Reproductive Health Access Project.

Connect with RHAP via Twitter, Facebook, or the RHAP Blog

RHAP Mission: The Reproductive Health Access Project (RHAP) seeks to ensure that women and teens at every socioeconomic level can readily obtain birth control and abortion from their own primary care clinician. Through training, advocacy and mentoring programs, RHAP helps family physicians and other clinicians make birth control and abortion a part of routine medical care.

What inspires Rosann about RHAP: I love that RHAP is so patient-centered. There are a multitude of myths out there about birth control that end up creating barriers for women. For example, some clinicians only provide 3 months worth of contraception at a time and then ask patients to come back to the office whenever they need a refill. But evidence shows that if you give a woman a 12 month supply of birth control it will make it easier for her to consistently use contraception and decrease her risk of an unintended pregnancy. I’m so proud that RHAP is out there providing this type of information - it can make such a big impact!

What Developers can help with:

SEO Optimization - RHAP has developed a wealth of clinical tools and patient educational fact sheets that are available for free on our website. Our resources are used all over the world and many have been translated into multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Korean, Creole, Portuguese, and Chinese. We’d love to do SEO Optimization on our website so our resources are easier to find in common search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Online platform for the RHAP Network - One of RHAP’s main projects is our Network - a group of over 450+ primary care clinicians across the U.S. who are working to integrate contraception and abortion into their practice. We offer guidance and technical support to these clinicians as well as create a pro-choice community for them to rely upon. Right now, our main method of staying in touch with Network members is via email, phone and e-newsletters. We’d like to create an online platform for our Network, where members could log in to a website that lets them track their progress integrating different reproductive health services.

For example: if a nurse practitioner in Oregon wants to offer IUDs at her clinic, we’d have a check list of steps she needs to take. She could tick off each step as she goes, email RHAP via the online portal if she has problems. Once she finishes all her steps we’d be able to add her to a map of clinicians across the US who are offering IUDs. Clearly, this is a big project and we’re just in the planning stage. But we’d love to get the input of a developer who could help us write up a formal proposal for this project, and help us understand what specific programming needs & costs it would include.

Impact these projects will have on RHAP and the world: Our website is already a huge resource for clinicians around the world on how to provide contraception, abortion care, and manage early pregnancy loss. By improving our website’s SEO we will make it an even more powerful, more accessible hub of information for clinicians and the patients they care for.

Our Network project is the heart of our national organizing efforts. By creating an online portal for the Network we will be able to connect and support family medicine practitioners across U.S. like never before. Some of the clinicians in our Network are the only pro-choice voice in their town/city/state. Having an online portal/forum will both give them the medical resources they need and offer them professional support so they can be a change maker in their community.

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