A Resource for Abortion Patient Navigators
Power to Decide created AbortionFinder as a public facing website to support anyone needing abortion care, funding, or support. Since its launch in 2020, AbortionFinder has had 9.3M visits, and last year the site welcomed 4.2 million visitors, 1.2 million of whom used our search feature to find an abortion provider. At the same time that we launched AbortionFinder, we also debuted a second platform, Navigate, for those in the abortion care community who are helping abortion seekers to access abortion care, resources, and support options.
Most Navigate users are patient navigators or care coordinators based at abortion clinics, abortion funds, or practical support organizations. They work directly with abortion seekers to help them navigate the process of identifying an abortion provider, coordinating a referral to an abortion provider, figuring out potential financial assistance resources, or determining their other logistical support needs (such as helping to book travel or support for childcare needs) and connecting them with organizations that help them.
And although Navigate and AbortionFinder are built on the same database and display much of the same information, the way that we share the data and build features is tailored to this audience and their navigation needs.
Like AbortionFinder, Navigate has all sorts of information on virtual and in-person abortion providers, including their clinical services and appointment availability; ways to search providers using maps or by distance from the abortion seeker’s location, estimated drive time from the abortion seeker’s location, or distance from the nearest major airport; searching for funding and support options based on where a seeker is coming from and where they are getting care; and near real-time abortion law information. But in addition, Navigate has information about which days of the week each provider offers each abortion type so that navigators can work with abortion seekers to help them find the best option for them. Navigate also has mechanisms to share information about going to certain providers, such as recommended hotels nearby. Beyond including more information, Navigate has tools to help patient navigators with their workflow, such as the ability to securely text abortion seekers with provider information including gestational limits and appointment availability estimates, support organization information, and resource information.
Critically, we built Navigate to help support patient navigators who are doing the extremely difficult work of providing compassionate and knowledgeable support to abortion seekers. Like many of the programs at Power to Decide, our digital tools are designed and tested by centering user needs. We regularly seek input from our users to understand how we might make the tool better, and just as with all of our digital tools, we work to continually improve the platform. After viewing a demo of Navigate one user told us, “For everything that I was thinking, ‘oh, it would be cool if they had that’ – then you showed it to us." We're proud to be able to support patient navigators through our Navigate platform, especially now as more people than ever are being forced to go to great lengths and distances to access abortion care.