2016

CarePRN: matching home care needs and givers

Care PRN

How can you improve access to professional and convenient home care?

 

Paula Lauren (fourth from left) competed at Hacking Health in Detroit last month, and received awards for her group's app, "CarePRN."

About CarePRN

RN nurse in training and home care provider Jason Wolfe-Greer entered Hacking Health Windsor Detroit’s first hackathon with a simple idea: make it easier for families to find and schedule home care for their loved ones. Together with his team they developed Care PRN, which won “Best Student Team from the US” award. This allowed them to benefit from a 3 month launch program at event host and research and technology business center Tech Town Detroit. This digital marketplace will make it easier for families find a trusted home caregiver while supporting homecare givers in finding reliable work and reducing administrative expenses.

What inspired you to launch your own business?

The launch of CarePRN came from personal need. When I was helping to care for my fiancée’s grandfather at home, there was no good source to turn to in order to find trustworthy home care. I did not need the constant care of a home healthcare agency and did not want some stranger from Craigslist. The desire to be able to get a break from the care demands of caring for a loved one at home and knowing they would be in the trustworthy, competent hands of a background-checked, certified caregiver is what drove me to start CarePRN.

Given what you know now, what would you have done differently in the beginning?

I would change my expectation on how easy it would be to get an idea from concept to market and how long that would take. From when I started working on CarePRN, I thought I would be to market in under a year, but there are many challenges and obstacles that must be overcome to keep an idea moving down the path to market.

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Valérie DoréCarePRN: matching home care needs and givers
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#HIP613 – A Launch That Had Everyone Buzzing

#HIP613 – A Launch That Had Everyone Buzzing

Hacking Health Ottawa has had a busy few weeks! In November, we launched our Health Innovation Program (HIP) in partnership with the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario and the Ottawa Children’s Treatment Centre (CHEO-OCTC). The sold-out event had full tri-sector engagement and brought together clinicians, programmers, designers and local innovators for an exciting evening. With the goal of unveiling the Program, providing insight as to how it would roll out, and having a good ‘ole time, we kicked off the evening with a talk from Haidee Thanda, the founder of the Ottawa chapter of Hacking Health. She described HIP as an “educational journey” that will create an environment in which change and innovation will be adopted. This will be accomplished by creating lasting relationships through a series of talks and hands-on workshops. People with different ideas and skills will have the opportunity to connect, and build teams to tackle problems such as the ones outlined on our Sparkboard.

This journey builds up to our capstone event: a hackathon. The hackathon is a design sprint where teams take what they have learned over the Program and work intensively over a weekend to build solutions. This event is not the end of the journey: a prototype is only the beginning. These prototypes will have the potential to transform an aspect of healthcare delivery. And this is where CHEO-OCTC really comes into play; as an anchor partner in HIP, CHEO-OCTC is committed to helping us innovate by considering the successful projects that come out of our Program for pilot opportunities at the hospital.

Mr. Alex Munter, CEO of CHEO-OCTC, inspired our community when he said “we have great people doing great things”, and reaffirmed the hospital’s commitment to innovation. He discussed the importance of innovation, and creating a thriving culture that could support growth. CHEO is achieving this by cultivating a community of problem solvers, in partnership with Hacking Health.

We then got to hear physicians speak about their experiences with technology. Dr. Matthew Bromwich, a paediatric surgeon and founder of Clearwater Clinical, discussed the importance of physician participation. Having invented and patented products for the medical industry, he is familiar with the dichotomy of business and medicine. He described the pitfalls associated with developing and adopting technology; this is where Hacking Health can fill the gap, by connecting innovators with resources and people who have been through the development process.

We also got to hear from Dr. Michael Taccone, a Neurosurgery resident at the University of Ottawa. Having had personal experience with cancer, he knows what it is like to be at the other end; he knows first hand that there are gaps in the patient experience that technology can help fill. Dr. Taccone spoke about the need for a secure technological solution that would enable patients to efficiently communicate with their doctors, and have access to information and support.

The event was capped off with “speed ideating,” facilitated by Jen Hunter, Chief Engagement Officer at Great Work. This launch was especially successful because we had nine incredible physicians and nurses pitch their ideas or specific needs, and then interact with techies and innovators.

 

A quick break during the speed ideating session.

Ideas ranged from building apps that could help diagnose, treat and monitor patients, to educational tools, and apps that would transform systems, and streamline administrative and triaging procedures — many of these real-world problems were identified during our April event.

It was an exciting and promising beginning to the Innovation Program, and we could not have done it without the support of CHEO-OCTC, our dedicated volunteers and our sponsors: Macadamian, Little Victories Coffee and IBM. We could not drive collaborative innovation without their commitment.

Sign up for the Hacking Health Ottawa newsletter and to stay up to date on all upcoming event details.

This event recap originally appeared on our Medium blog.

Hacking Health Ottawa#HIP613 – A Launch That Had Everyone Buzzing
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Hacking Health Ottawa: Behind the Scenes

Originally published by Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) on Medium.


Since March, there hasn’t been much rest for the partners in an initiative to use technological change to improve healthcare. Over the innovation platform’s four events, Hacking Health Ottawa, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), Impact HUB Ottawa, and volunteers from IBM have brought together doctors, developers, designers, policy analysts, entrepreneurs, and healthcare administrators to ask the question: how can we use technology to make healthcare better?.

There is remarkable enthusiasm for answering this question in Ottawa. Since March, more than 200 people attended these events. Hacking Health Ottawa doubled its number of volunteers. Conversations continued longer than the events themselves.

At each event, attendees considered tough questions like: What problems do people face when they interact with the healthcare system? How can technology disrupt healthcare? How can design thinking find new solutions to old problems?

On July 4th, William Charnetski, Ontario’s Chief Health Innovation Strategist, visited CHEO to discuss these questions and see the innovation happening at CHEO.

This was the same day as the launch of Ontario’s $20 million Health Technologies Fund (HTF), which will support the development of made-in-Ontario health technologies. The HTF is a great opportunity for health technology entrepreneurs as they develop prototypes, conduct market evaluations, and ultimately diffuse such innovations into the Ontario health system.

Investing in innovative made-in-Ontario health technology projects will help improve patient experience and transform our health care system,” said Dr. Eric Hoskins, Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, at the launch of HTF.

It is an exciting time to be in healthcare innovation. That excitement was in the room when Hacking Health Ottawa, CHEO, the Hub, and volunteers from IBM recently created a roadmap for the next coming months of the innovation platform.

Irene Pylypenko, Dan Del Balso, and Isabelle Lusseyran from Hacking Health Montreal attended and lent their insights to the Ottawa team. With a facilitated design thinking session and the help of many post-it notes, the team mapped the steps that will lead to a design challenge where teams will develop prototypes for use at CHEO.

Pylypenko, Del Balso and Lusseyran brought with them the wealth of experience of running hackathons in Montreal, as well as the lessons they have learned from other Hacking Health events in countries such as Italy and the Netherlands.

This international perspective has been part of the initiative from the start. Hacking Health Ottawa is part of a global movement active in more than 30 cities. Similarly, Hub Ottawa is a member of the diverse Hub network, with locations in more than 80 cities around the world.


“Being part of the global Impact Hub network allows us to practice what we often hear being preached:think global, act local,” says James Chan, Director of Civic Innovation at the Hub. “We also share this global/local dynamic with the Hacking Health movement, which has grown into a network of locally-run chapters in cities around the world. Our challenge and opportunity is to leverage our global resources so we do not have to reinvent the wheel, while recognizing Ottawa’s unique context and realizing there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach.”


Ottawa is unique because it is home to embassies, representatives, and diaspora from all over the world, as well as entrepreneurs, organizations and institutions doing important work abroad, says Chan. He also points out this initiative is part of an exciting trend of such global/local initiatives popping up in Ottawa, including Creative Mornings, TEDx, and Tech4Good.

These factors provide a fertile ecosystem for the local community to do something great for healthcare in Ottawa, while relying on global networks. With Hacking Health and the Hub’s reach into dynamic international communities, plus CHEO’s expertise in health and IBM’s expertise in technology, as well as the enthusiasm of the 200 people who have been involved so far, there’s no doubt this initiative is going to take the health and tech sectors by storm.

It’s only a matter of time before an idea from the innovation platform becomes a project that applies to opportunities like the HTF.

If you want to be part of finding solutions to healthcare problems, sign up to receive our news and learn about upcoming events.

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iUGO Care, Born in HH Toronto

CareKit was created during the 2015 eHealth conference in Toronto for the Hacking Health Design Challenge.
This comprehensive software and hardware solution enables monitoring and management in real time of at home patients with the use of wearables and sensors. Eight months later, Reliq Health acquired CareKit (rebranded iUGO Care) for $2 million in shares and performance warrants. Co-founders Leo Godreault and Giancarlo De Lio gave us some insight on their incredible journey.

Latest Update

Reliq Health Technologies Named #1 2018 TSX Venture 50TM Performer, and Reaches 10,000 Patients Live on Its iUGO Care Platform

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How it started

“Leo initiated the project” explains Giancarlo. “We met before the challenge in a coffee shop, he told me about his idea, and he convinced me to come onboard”. Hacking Health Design Challenge focused on themes such as patient management, patient coordination and communication so their team developed CareKit, a care coordination platform connected to wearables and Estimote Beacon sensors linked to Apple’s HealthKit. The data generated by patients while at home is shared with healthcare professionals and family members, allowing them to monitor their health remotely.

Carekit TeamLeo and Giancarlo benefited from the strengths of well-rounded team with the right skill set and talents to succeed. Giancarlo is an accomplished entrepreneur with a background in healthcare IT who had previously sat on the jury for the 2014 eHealth Hacking Health Hackathon while Leo is a trained nurse who had also participated in the Apps For Health challenge.

CareKit won both Most Innovative Solution and Microsoft Digital Health Awards and the Microsoft Digital Health Awards – Giancarlo says that developing and refining both hardware and software was one of the added value of their project. The high quality of the final demo presented by Leo ensured their success at the competition.

Now barely a year after, CareKit, now rebranded iUGO Care, was acquired by Reliq Health. This opportunity will enable Leo and Giancarlo to accelerate their growth and expand their client base. When we asked them about
the key elements to such an amazing success in a short amount of time, Giancarlo simply said: “We took our
idea and hit the ground running!”
They both acknowledge that the Hacking Health Design Challenge was the drive behind iUGO Care. The eight week format of the design challenge facilitated prototype development and «the creation of something truly functional». Additionally they were able to understand the needs of the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), an important leader in the field, and meet the right people. During the meetups organised by Hacking Health, they had the opportunity to discuss with mentors who stirred them towards the right direction. For instance, Leo explained that it was a suggestion from industry leaders that prompted them to consider a feature to monitor patients remotely. Giancarlo named Dave Greenwood as one of the leaders that saw the potential of their project and supported them during the various steps of the challenge. The fact that OTN supported iUGO Care even after the competition encouraged them to keep on going with their project.

After an exhausting but rewarding Design Challenge, they had to make a decision: to engage in iUGO Care as entrepreneurs or to let go. Giancarlo explains that it takes complete dedication to move a project of this
scale forward. Leo, who at the time was working as a nurse, took a leap of faith and decided to focus on iUGO Care with Giancarlo full time. What would he recommend to future participants that could be faced with a similar dilemma? “It’s very difficult, I would say that it has to be a project that is really meaningful to them. It has to be a risk that they are willing to take”.

Now What?

iUGO Care has announced two pilot projects and a full scale contract in the US and expects to expand into Canada and Europe later this year. Since the end of the competition, they added a voice technology to their existing software and hardware hub. The goal of iUGO Care is to reduce emergency visits and hospital readmissions of complex patients. iUGO Care forms a support circle around the patient that enables healthcare
practitioners, caretakers and family members to monitor complex patients at home and to guide them in
managing their care plans with a system of alerts and teaching modules.

To celebrate iUGO Care’s first anniversary, Leo and Giancarlo will mentor and judge during the next Hacking Health Design Challenge at the eHealth conference. They both continue to work hard on the development of their application and to create their own proprietary hardware while carefully following the result of the pilots.

We congratulate them for their dedication and hard work!

Read more success stories

Valérie DoréiUGO Care, Born in HH Toronto
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From ‘RUN TO PLAY’ to ‘RUN TO SAVE’: Becoming Entrepreneurs with Hacking Health

The Inception

Run to Play was conceived during the cocktail hour of Montreal’s 2015 Hackathon when a group of tech-savvy innovators found a common interest in promoting a healthy lifestyle amongst teenagers. Immediately they found a quiet and isolated space that contrasted with the upbeat atmosphere of the event and started conceptualizing their idea. They were so focused and driven that by the beginning of the last day they were ready with a prototype to present to the judges.

Their idea, named ‘Run to play’, was an application to encourage physical activity among teenagers. Their challenge was how to motivate teenagers to exercise instead of spending hours video gaming. Therefore, they created an app that rewarded young gamers redeemable points for video games based on their physical activities. Their prototype won first place in health promotion. The team felt that the Hackathon enabled them to actively find a viable solution to health promotion problems in Canada, and their takeaway, as they expressed it, was: «We have to innovate and use technology to make people’s lives easier and find solutions to our everyday problems. Events like the Hacking Health Hackathon bring together people with different perspectives to work on real problems and find creative solutions that we wouldn’t have thought about if we were in a special committee that always does the same thing, the same way. I think those events are a great way to improve the health care system.»

Becoming Entrepreneurs?

After the success of their first Hackathon, the newly-formed team was faced with a dilemma, whether to make Run to play a reality or to stop the adventure there. The decision was not an easy one to make, and even though three of the four members knew each other beforehand they had never worked together in such a setting before. Solene told us that it was important to build trust and to learn how to work as a team of entrepreneurs in order to bring this app to fruition.

The Hacking Health Bootcamp as a stepping stone

After spending ample time thinking about the future of Run to play, they were encouraged by the success of their work at the Hackathon and decided to pursue the opportunity through the Montréal Hacking Health Bootcamp. The Bootcamp was an occasion to focus solely on their project for five whole weeks, and as the team recalls, the demands of the coaches were high but so were the anticipated rewards.

From Run to Play to Run to Save

The Bootcamp was an eye-opener for them, and by immersing themselves in an entrepreneurial atmosphere and meeting potential clients they gained new insights regarding their business model, the target audience and new methods of financing. With all that valuable information, they decided to focus on a new target audience in order to better monetize their application. Still working in the health promotion realm, they now decided to focus on women aged 22-44. Their application, now called Run to Save, would offer coupons from retail stores based on the physical activity of the users. Their plan is to partner with the big retailers in order to deliver coupons to a highly sought-after market. For the customers, Run to Save brings much more than charts, goal setting and numbers by offering interesting saving prospects. It’s a win-win-win situation!

Next steps

Their next step is to meet with more retailers in order to validate their new market of choice and solidify their business plan.

«It is because of the Bootcamp that we made promising plans for the future. Here we learned how to analyze our market and divide it into relevant segments. Because of this, we changed our strategy…. The Bootcamp opened more doors for us.»

Valérie DoréFrom ‘RUN TO PLAY’ to ‘RUN TO SAVE’: Becoming Entrepreneurs with Hacking Health
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Hacking Health Ottawa Café: Designing for Healthcare

 


On May 11th, a sold-out event brought more than 60 people together at Impact Hub Ottawa for an inspiring event on using technology to solve problems in the healthcare system.

Originally published by Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) on Medium.


The Hub was the perfect place to bring together designers, UX experts, policy analysts, entrepreneurs and healthcare administrators to discuss innovation in healthcare. The Hub has been a partner of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) and Hacking Health Ottawa’s innovation platform from the time the initiative was launched in March, with the support of volunteers from IBM.

Additionally, as a collaborative learning environment and incubation ecosystem for people and organizations working to better the world, the Hub’s spirit of innovation and teamwork permeated the event.

Yishel Khan, the founder of DOT Inc. and a Fellow with Hacking Health Montreal, described how technology can help break the silos in medical culture. “Today the time is right and change is inevitable. This is why wearables and m-healthcare technologies are so relevant now.”

DOT Inc. uses a brain-sensing headband to diagnose Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children, and develops customized plans to help children with ADHD develop cognitive skills through interactive games.

The idea for DOT was born at a 48-hour event called WearHacks Hackathon, an event much like the innovation weekend Hacking Health Ottawa and CHEO will host as well. This innovation weekend will be the culmination of the series of events encouraging innovation in healthcare, with the goal to create beta prototypes to be used at CHEO.

 


“[DOT] went from a hackathon idea to doctors and neuroscientists being involved. The key is finding the right people,” said Yishel Khan, founder of DOT Inc. “Hacking Health is a great platform to connect you with like-minded people.”


 

Dr. Jordan Littman, a family physician practicing in Barrhaven, affirmed the importance of connecting with others. He spoke about his experience developing an app to synthesize information on the costs of medications, and encouraged attendees to learn from his experience.

“If I were to start all over, I would definitely want other people to work with me. This is why a platform like Hacking Health is so important,” Dr. Littman said. “I could have probably created this in a day if I had a developer work with me, but instead I learned how to code on my own. That was one of the struggles along the way, and realizing the value of having different people working on it with you.”

The event built on the enthusiasm from three previous Hacking Health Ottawa-CHEO events. Together, these events have brought together hundreds of people excited to innovate healthcare, and have started conversations on everything from disrupting health systems to healthcare problems that technology can begin to solve.

The same excitement was obvious at the Hub, too. “People are inspired and motivated, but more than anything they want to get down and dirty and actually build things!” said Haidee Thanda, one of the leads at Hacking Health Ottawa.

It was hard for some people to leave the event. Many lingered at the Hub long after the event officially ended, continuing the conversations and discussing the ideas sparked during the evening.

Fortunately, there will be more opportunities to keep the conversations going. Whatever your interest in healthcare or innovation, if you would like to be invited to future events, including our next event, check out HH Ottawa’s page.

 

Hacking Health OttawaHacking Health Ottawa Café: Designing for Healthcare
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Haleo, Born in HH Montreal

haleo team DISbanner

Haleo, Born in HH Montreal

How did Haleo start off?

We formed a team during Hacking Health Montreal’s Défi Innovation Santé, prototyped our app in 30 hours and ended up winning the Public Health Agency of Canada prize, which includes training and market research support from Canada’s prestigious MaRS Venture Services.

Tell us briefly about your product

We’re a user-friendly mobile app that tracks both the client’s sleep behaviour and state of mental health. We included a medical rationale for properly segmenting of client screening results, and a standardized, web-based report for the medical professional that clearly flags when the key indicators of sleep apnea and mental distress are at levels that require medical attention.

We seek to do three things:

1. increase the accessibility of screening for sleep disorders
2. improve the availability of care by:
– making non-prescription behavioural therapies, which are recommended as the first-line treatment for insomnia, widely available
– accelerating and improving coordinated care for people potentially suffering from sleep disordered breathing.
3. objectively evaluate treatment effectiveness in improving sleep quality (which is rarely done for sleep disorder treatment) through follow-up screening

As we speak it’s been 6 months since the hackathon, what have you been up to?

The HALEO Healthy Sleep Program is coming along nicely. We’ve completed a prototype service consisting of the protocols, decision trees and reports for sleep disorder screening. It involves a combination of clinical tools, including digital questionnaires and a medical device approved by Health Canada and the FDA for sleep disorder screening.
Since mid-April we have been testing the prototype service with clients from two of HALEO’s partner pharmacies.

Congrats on the regulatory approvals! What type of support do you have for your project’s development?

The HALEO Medical Advisory Committee is also becoming an increasingly critical part of the project. The committee is responsible for evaluating the HALEO Healthy Sleep Program prior to its commercialisation. The members of this committee, which includes 4 clinical psychologists, 2 neurologists, an ENT specialist, a respiratory technician and a pulmonologist, each have between 10 and 30 years of sleep clinic experience and are among the leaders in their respective specialties in Canada (some at a global level). This highly talented group have dedicated their careers to improving population sleep health and are intrigued by the potential of the HALEO solution.

HaleoDISsmall

“I figured that Hacking Health might be a good opportunity to test a concept I have been working on to deliver sleep screening programs via the pharmacy.”

READ MORE ABOUT BRADLEY’S EXPERIENCE

What do you have in store for the future?

HALEO is now finalizing and validating the Healthy Sleep Program, and is preparing a training course for pharmacists and their teams. Our objective is to launch the service (including our website!) in the next month and to be distributed in 15 pharmacies participating in the Pharmacie 3.0 initiative by the end of the summer. We are also working on a telemedicine initiative to accelerate the development of the Healthy Sleep Program in other channels and geographic territories. Anyone interested in learning more about HALEO can contact me at brad@haleo.ca.

Furthermore, the HALEO Healthy Sleep Program has the potential to generate detailed biometric and self-reported sleep data on a scale that could be highly beneficial to clinical sleep research.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We’ll be launching our website
And finally…from the Hackathon to the Bootcamp and beyond, a big thanks to HackingHealth for its ongoing support of HALEO!


“A big thanks to Luc Sirois, Irene Pylypenko and the hundred or so organizers and volunteer coaches of Hacking Health for putting on an exceptional event.”


UPDATE

Bradley Smith checks in on us for a Hacking Health Radio interview

Valérie DoréHaleo, Born in HH Montreal
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LogixMD – Born in HH Winnipeg


Choose Wisely When Ordering Pre-operative Laboratory Tests.

LogixMDIt started as a doctor’s pitch in Winnipeg last year, but now LogixMD is a dynamic medical software company that creates innovative knowledge translation software and web apps that transform complex medical decision making processes into simple and logical workflow.The LogixMD team is currently testing a beta version of its latest application, Preopsys. Below is Dr. Abbu’s take on the whole experience

Our journey began with the simple idea of making prudent choices to try and reduced the enormous waste that pervades healthcare in general. As a family doctor-anesthetists I could identify with 2 sides of the same coin, in terms of routine pre-operative testing. The paper based system was ineffective and the multitude of unnecessary tests was obvious, but how could one person initiate change for the better.

he Hacking Health experience

The Hacking Health experience allowed a powerless individual physician towork collaboratively with colleagues from the computer and graphic design worlds and create a powerful solution for an important healthcare problem. – Dr. Ganesan Abbu

Leveraging technology, appeared to be the ideal solution, however, my lack of computer expertise coupled with the lack of support from healthcare were significant barriers. I chanced upon an invite to a Hacking Health Hackathon and the rest is history. I teamed up with Keegan Walker and Clayton Wilchowy and through our collaboration during the 48 hour Hacking Health weekend, developed the embryonic version of Preopsys. Our efforts won the main prize (for the most commercially viable product).

Over the next few months we worked with purpose and diligence to complete the beta version and test run it with a group of family doctors from Winkler and Morden. They were excited, without exception, by the speed, accuracy and simplicity of design. It also caught the eye of Choosing Wisely Canada and Manitoba e-Health with whom weare now working collaboratively.

To formalize our arrangements, we created a company, LogixMD, and developed a website to promote ourselves. As for money, we have none as yet! Nonetheless, we are proud to provide value for the people of Manitoba. The Hacking Health experience allowed a powerless individual physician to work collaboratively with colleagues from the computer and graphic design worlds and create a powerful solution for an important healthcare problem.

We are hopeful that Manitoba will soon, officially adopt our app. Our long term ambition is to try and get the rest of Canada to embrace this as an opportunity to develop a National Guideline for pre-operative testing; so that all provinces may benefit from what is clearly a huge cost saving technology.

TEAM

Dr. Ganesan Abbu (CEO & Co-founder of LogixMD)

Other team members:

Keegan Walker (Director & Co-founder of LogixMD)

Clayton Wilchowy (Director & Co-founder of LogixMD)

MEDIA COVERAGE

CTV WNPhackathon

Valérie DoréLogixMD – Born in HH Winnipeg
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Hacking Health Ottawa: Design Thinking Recap


Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stop Ottawa’s healthcare leaders from improving healthcare..

Originally published by Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) on Medium.


The record-breaking snowstorm on April 6 didn’t deter more than 50 healthcare professionals from attending the latest in a series of events to innovate health, organized by the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) and Hacking Health Ottawa.

IBM’s Design Studio, with its colourful walls and creative use of space, was the perfect venue to match the energy of the people in the room.

It’s good to think big. But you have to start small. And you have to move fast so you don’t lose momentum,” said Dr. Matthew Bromwich, CHEO pediatrician and Chief Medical Officer at Clearwater Clinical, in his opening remarks to the crowd.

In March, CHEO and Hacking Health announced their partnership to find solutions to difficult healthcare problems. Working with Impact Hub Ottawa and volunteers from IBM, the initiative has garnered attention in Ottawa and beyond. Olympian Jennifer Heil even extended her congratulations.

The Design Thinking event on April 6 brought together pediatricians, technologists, and administrators from CHEO, the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI), IBM, and other organizations, to consider the problems within healthcare.

It made sense to ask: how can we help with healthcare?” said Greg Adams, Director and Distinguished Engineer, IBM Cognos Analytics. “When you look at healthcare, it is ripe for innovation. What would happen if we bring a lot of people together to start creating a pool of ideas?

Shahira Bhimani, Vice President of Innovation Services at Health Technology Exchange (HTX), visited from Toronto to highlight funding opportunities for innovative health technologies, including HTX’s own grant program, REACH.

She pointed to the Ontario government’s appointment of a Chief Health Innovation Strategist to show there is support within Ontario for ambitious health solutions. “Think disruptive. Think system impact.”.


Dr. Jim King, CHEO’s Medical Director of Informatics, added,  “We need to become a learning organization that asks questions.”


It was a room full of innovators, including Dr. Kumanan Wilson of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, who spearheaded development of the award-winning ImmunizeCA app, and Dr. Pranesh Chakraborty, who worked with Mari Teitelbaum, Vice President of Technology and Chief Information Officer at CHEO, to launch the Better Outcomes Registry & Network (BORN), which improves the health of mothers, newborns and children in Ontario.

Teitelbaum saw the Design Thinking event as a way to encourage new ideas. “We don’t often have the opportunity to step outside of the day-to-day. This is an opportunity to step into a different way of thinking.

According to Teitelbaum, the CHEO + Hacking Health Ottawa partnership has real potential to improve care at CHEO. “This for me is a win: if we have three really good solutions make into the hospital in a year.

Dr. Jim King, CHEO’s Medical Director of Informatics, added, “We need to become a learning organization that asks questions.

Yasmine Taha, a user experience designer at IBM, showed the importance of asking the right questions by starting the design thinking session with two very different questions.

Taha first asked participants to design a doorbell, prompting 50 people to draw similar sketches of doorbells. She then asked them to design a way for a hearing-impaired person to know if someone was at the door. This second question received a wide range of responses, from low-tech to high-tech interventions.

“In the first example, you were given a solution: a doorbell,” said Taha. “In the second, you were presented with a problem, and it created a bigger dialogue and more diverse solutions. Focus on users, not on features.

Participants broke into groups and considered the perspectives of different stakeholders within the healthcare system, such as a family doctor, a pediatric oncologist, and a philanthropist. They created problem statements from the perspective of each of these stakeholders, including statements and questions like:

  • Who is involved in my patient’s healthcare and how do I talk to them?
  • How do I keep up with best practices in my field?
  • I want to connect with my patient’s care team in hospital so I can be prepared to refer or take over their care.

For Haidee Thanda of Hacking Health Ottawa, it was important to begin the process with healthcare professionals because “every good solution starts with a good problem, and they’re closer to the problems.

Future events will bring together healthcare professionals, entrepreneurs, developers, and engineers to discuss these and other problems, and begin creating solutions for them. The events will culminate in a weekend design challenge held this fall, where prototypes to solve problems will be built over 42–72 hours.

Viable solutions will have the opportunity to be taken to the next level by presenting to CHEO and other stakeholders.

We want to set up a culture of innovating,” Dr. Bromwich told participants. “Connection between you and other people is what makes that happen.

Be part of making it happen. Sign up here to receive updates for this exciting initiative and be the first to hear of next events.

Hacking Health OttawaHacking Health Ottawa: Design Thinking Recap
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