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Home/Case Studies/Sierra Environmental Intelligence
✦ Case study / A micro-build  —  Healthcare content automation · In production

The briefing that writes itself.

Sierra Allergy needed to keep patients across Fresno and Merced informed about the conditions that trigger their symptoms — pollen, air quality, wildfire smoke. Instead of a big platform, we built a small system: it pulls live environmental data every morning, drafts a ready-to-publish patient briefing, and waits for a one-tap human approval before anything goes out.

Client: Sierra AllergyType: Micro-build · Content automationMarkets: Fresno · MercedStatus: In production
Micro-buildContent automationEnvironmental dataAI draftingHuman-in-the-loopHealthcare
§ 01 — The problem

A message worth sending, every day.

Allergy and asthma symptoms track closely with conditions the practice already understands better than anyone — pollen counts, air quality, wildfire smoke drifting through the Central Valley. Sharing that with patients daily is genuinely useful content: timely, on-brand, and exactly the kind of thing that builds trust between visits.

The catch is the labor. Pulling four or five separate data sources, translating them into plain language, and publishing something every single morning isn't a task a busy clinic has spare hands for — so, realistically, it never gets done consistently by hand.

Without it
Useful daily content that nobody has time to actually produce, so it doesn't happen
With it
A drafted, ready-to-post briefing waiting every morning — one approval, then it's live
§ 02 — How it works

Five data sources, one briefing.

Every morning, the system checks real-time conditions across both Sierra locations and drafts a patient-facing update — then stops and waits for a person before anything is published.

01
Pull the data
Air quality (AirNow), pollen (Google Pollen), wildfire smoke (NASA FIRMS) and weather (NOAA / Open-Meteo) for Fresno & Merced.
02
Combine
Readings are merged into one picture of the day's conditions across both cities.
03 · Draft
AI writes it up
Claude (with a Gemini failover) turns the raw readings into a clear, patient-friendly briefing.
04
Approve
The draft lands in Slack. A quick human check — approve, edit, or hold — before anything goes out.
05
Publish
Approved briefings are ready to post to the website and social — consistent, without daily manual work.
Sample briefing · Fresno & MercedDraft — pending approval
Today's conditions across the Valley
Pollen
HighGrass & ragweed
Air quality
ModerateAQI ~78 · EPA
Wildfire smoke
LowNo active detections

Drafted for review: conditions are quoted and attributed to the source (EPA, Google Pollen) rather than reworded as the practice's own claim — the safer, most authoritative framing for medical content.

§ 03 — The details that mattered

Small decisions, done right.

A micro-build still has real decisions inside it — the kind that determine whether patients (and a doctor's reputation) can trust what gets published.

Attribution, not authorship
Conditions are reported in the source's own words and cited directly — e.g. “EPA rates today's air Moderate” — rather than the clinic making its own characterisation. The safer, more defensible footing for medical content.
Human approval, always
Nothing publishes automatically. Every briefing routes to Slack for a one-tap review before it goes live — automation drafts, a person still decides.
Built for two cities
Fresno and Merced are tracked and reported separately, matching how the practice actually serves the Central Valley.
Resilient by design
A Gemini failover keeps drafts flowing if the primary model has an outage — the daily briefing doesn't silently stop.
AirNow APIGoogle Pollen APINASA FIRMSNOAA / Open-MeteoClaudeGemini (failover)Slack approvalSupabase
§ 04 — Under the hood

A small stack, doing one job well.

Micro-builds don't need a heavy platform underneath them — just the right small pieces, wired together cleanly.

Data sources
AirNow (air quality), Google Pollen API, NASA FIRMS (active-fire detection) and NOAA / Open-Meteo (weather) — four independent APIs, queried daily for both Fresno and Merced.
Drafting
Claude writes the patient-facing briefing from the raw readings, with Gemini as an automatic failover if the primary model is unavailable.
Storage
Supabase holds the daily readings and draft history — a lightweight Postgres backend, no bespoke database to maintain.
Frontend
A small React interface for reviewing and editing drafts alongside the Slack approval flow.
Approval & delivery
Slack is the human checkpoint — approve, edit or hold — before a briefing is ever marked ready to publish.
§ 05 — Why it's a micro-build

One problem, solved precisely.

This isn't a platform, and it was never meant to be one. It's a small, sharp tool aimed at a single recurring problem — a daily briefing nobody had time to write — solved end to end and left running quietly in the background. That's the whole idea behind micro-builds: AI has made small, bespoke software cheap enough that a problem this specific is finally worth solving properly, instead of being left as a nice-to-have nobody gets to.

The best content strategy is the one that actually ships, every day, without anyone having to remember to do it.

Honest note

This system drafts content and proposes it for approval — it doesn't publish unsupervised, and it doesn't replace clinical judgement. It removes the labor of assembling the data every morning; a human still decides what goes out, every time.

§ The work around it

Where this fits.

A small build, wired into a bigger content and search strategy. Each piece is a service in its own right.

§ Start a project

Got a small, recurring problem nobody has time for? Let's fix it.

Tell us what task eats your team's time every day — the first reply comes from a partner, not a form.