Coding Care: Engineering a Verified-Anonymous Community Platform for Healthcare Professionals

Abstract

Occupational burnout, emotional exhaustion, and psychological distress present an escalating crisis for healthcare professionals across the United States—an issue compounded by existing digital platforms’ inability to meet critical needs: providing clinicians with a space that is both trustworthy and anonymous. This pair is key to the most impactful form of peer support in a profession where speaking openly can be risky for professional careers. This thesis presents ScrubCircle, a mobile-first community platform engineered exclusively for verified healthcare workers, and documents its design, backend implementation, security architecture, and evaluation methodology. The central technical contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a verified-anonymous system architecture: one in which institutional identity is confirmed during onboarding through domain-based email verification and multi-factor authentication, yet remains fully decoupled from all user-generated content through a pseudonymous alias system. This architecture is grounded in established identity assurance frameworks, privacy threat modeling methodologies, and rule-based backend authorization enforced at the data layer through Firebase Security Rules. Beyond the core anonymity and verification infrastructure, this thesis documents the implementation of ScrubCircle’s alpha-stage features—including anonymous posting, polling, topic-channel navigation, keyword search, and community moderation tooling—as well as the design of planned expansions in AI-assisted content moderation, direct messaging, and a healthcare-specific resource store. The evaluation methodology encompasses four key dimensions: backend performance and scalability testing, security control assessment, privacy risk analysis, and a user-centered usability study using the System Usability Scale. The findings indicate that a verified-anonymous architecture is technically feasible at the alpha stage, that robust security and privacy controls can be implemented and evaluated within a Firebase-based backend, and that the platform’s design addresses documented gaps in professional digital communities for healthcare workers. The limitations of the current evaluation are outlined, together with a roadmap for future development.