anchorage-built-alaskas-vaccine-finder.md

talk_id	talk_slug	talk_type	talk_tags	session_slug	talk_title	talk_title_short	talk_materials_url	speakers
22139	anchorage-built-alaskas-vaccine-finder	regular	interop process production story	rapid-response	How Anchorage Built Alaska’s Vaccine Finder with R	How Anchorage Built Alaska’s Vaccine Finder with R		name affiliation url username photo bio Ben Matheson Municipality of Anchorage Innovation Team webpage twitter github linkedin affiliation https://benmatheson.com/ https://twitter.com/benmatheson https://github.com/benmatheson https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmatheson https://muni.org ben_matheson /assets/img/2022Conf/_talks/22139_ben-matheson.jpg Ben Matheson is the Data Analyst for the Anchorage Innovation Team— a startup inside city government—where he helps people solve problems using data and technology. Ben works extensively with R and JavaScript to analyze data, visualize ideas, and build tools. He has worked as a public radio reporter across rural Alaska and covered the Iditarod. He enjoys getting deep into the mountains.

In January 2021, Alaska residents seeking a COVID-19 vaccine appointment faced a convoluted maze of websites. The software was made for providers—not for residents.

The Anchorage Innovation Team built a fast, and mobile vaccine finder website for Alaska using R. What started as a web scraping prototype launched statewide one week later and ultimately connected tens of thousands of Alaskans to a vaccine.

This talk will cover how we used R to build Alaska's vaccine finder. Including:

• Scraping and http packages (rvest & httr)
• Using Heroku and S3 to run R jobs 24/7
• Creating a flexible data service with R