Hackathon
150 hackathons and just getting started
Hacking Health: Bottom-up Innovation for Health article from July 2012 in Technology Innovation Management Review noted how top-down government approaches to health have failed to deliver digital technologize to modernize healthcare. “Disruptive innovation must come from the ground up by bridging the gap between frontline health experts and innovators in the latest web and mobile technology,” wrote Jeesham Chowdhury.
Here we capture this grass-roots initiative grew to an international movement, as we celebrate the 150th hackathon in Hamilton, Ontario.
Hamilton marks 150th hackathon milestone for Hacking Health
When Hacking Health started in 2012 in Montreal, it would have been inconceivable that seven years later, it would have orchestrated 150 hackathon events. It will be the 58th Hacking Health hackathon in Canada across 18 cities since 2012.
The academic institutions of Hamilton and the synergistic network of facilities make it an ideal place to host this 150th Hackathon. Join us at McMaster Innovation Park on November 8-10.
ExperifyHealth | Working to Overcome Social Isolation in Facilities
ExperifyHealth exemplifies the novel experience of many teams at a hackathon. Dr. Jonah Marek, Physician at Bruyère, explains first-hand their experience and reflections from the dual-city hackathon series, in conjunction with True North.
Swiss Hacking Health: The Secret Of An Amazing Longevity
After five successful editions, Arkathon, the Hacking Health Switzerland-Valais‘ hackathon is one of the most important health hackathons in Switzerland. A must for the country’s disruptive minds!
How does such an event work? Immersed in a medical facility over a weekend, participants meet with health professionals and patients to develop innovative solutions to solve their health challenges. At the end of these 48 intense hours, the objective is to present a jury of experts concrete digital solutions to address health issues. Each year, the three winners are followed by an acceleration program offered by The Ark Foundation and Swiss Digital Health.
>> Discover the after movie of the last Arkathon’s edition
A robust ecosystem: a work over the years
In the tradition of Hacking Health’s events, Arkathon infused its spirit of innovation and create strong synergies between very diversified stakeholders: academics, institutes and health professionals, patient associations, industry, start-ups,… Partnerships have been created over the years between the actors of digital health innovation: The Ark Foundation, Swiss Digital Health, the Clinique Romande de réadaptation, the Valais hospital site, the HES-SO Valais/Wallis, EPFL Valais/Wallis, GRIMM, the Institut de Recherche en réadaptation, etc.
>> Discover the interviews of the jury about the last Arkathon’s edition
“This type of events accelerates projects and immediately detects their technical feasibility and economic potential,” explains Sébastien Mabillard, organizing member of Arkathon HH Switzerland – Valais. ” For the past 5 years, acceleration programs have been offered to hackathon winners by Swiss Digital Health and the Ark Foundation. It’s a way to get these nuggets to market quickly. Our objective is to encourage the emulation of projects with our partners and to support solution providers to “feed” the innovation cluster with viable prototypes to quickly respond to the needs of the field. “
Many success stories around the Arkathon of Hacking Health Valais
Recently, a start-up company, Transcend, created by three Valais computer science students, has developed an innovative training tool for high-tech rescue, based on virtual reality technologies. Another hat off to the start-up Eyeware, which has just raised a significant sum of €1.9 million for its eye-tracking system. These two solutions have hatched during previous editions of the Arkathon and are now shining on national and international markets!
>> Discover the interview of three winners’ teams of the last Arkathon’s edition
Join the community and hack tomorrow’s health !
Curious about our event? Do you want to participate in the 2020 edition and contribute its extraordinary longevity with us? Click here to find more information.
Our team of 4, Sébastien Mabillard, Nadia Mottier, Joël Rossier and Frédérique Décaillet, is looking forward to welcoming you to the Valais Alps!
Hacking Health Hackathon, by Besançon (France)
—– Retrouvez l’article original en français —–
On October 2018, the Hacking Health chapter of Besançon organized its second health hackathon (open innovation marathon). This event confirmed the enthusiasm raised by the first edition, and highlighted three strong trends:
– A vast majority of students participated in the marathon: 75% of the 309 participants came from the local university or the “grandes écoles” (renowned engineer and business schools). This massive mobilization of students generates extraordinary energy, creativity, and generosity.
– The expertise of the local ecosystem is well represented: Microtechnology and miniaturization, a specialty inherited from the watch industry of which Besançon is a leader. Thus, many highly skilled engineers have joined teams composed of digital developers, electronic specialists, and designers.
– An important fablab (Fabrication Laboratory) gathering all the material and human resources of two fablabs and two engineering schools allowed to prototype operational devices in less than 48 hours.
extraordinary energy, creativity, and generosity
In this context, all the 24 health professionals and patients who came to pitch their issue have found a team. No team gave up during the weekend, and the quality of the solutions was terrific. This may explain that, two months after the marathon, two project holders are about to create their startup. Since this cannot be done overnight, we created a 3-month incubator program after the hackathon to assist teams in the maturation of their projects and help them connect with the right partners.
Another novelty in 2018: the creation of a showroom, in parallel with the innovation marathon. Seventeen French and Swiss Hacking Health project leaders came to present their innovation to the public, share their experience, and expand their network.
Join the 2019 hackathon in Besançon
– Or find the nearest Hacking Health event –
Would you like to participate in the 3rd Open Innovation Marathon of Health in Besançon? Would you enjoy prototyping solutions to respond to real problems posed by health professionals and patients? What about an exciting and entertaining weekend based on cooperation and exchange?
Join the Hacking Health hackathon in Besançon from 18 to 20 October 2019 and imagine tomorrow’s healthcare solutions!
———- Author: Christophe Dollet, Leader of the Hacking Health chapiter in Besançon and Coordinator of France-based chapters. Christophe works at Smart City, a project of the city of Besançon.
Watch this video to get a feeling of the 2018 hackathon in Besançon.
Dutch Hacking Health: It’s All about the Mix (Janssen BeNeLux)
Making a breakthrough in the health care sector in just three days: It seems like an almost impossible task. And yet this is exactly what Dutch Hacking Health—an event that really can accelerate innovation—aims to achieve! The fourth Dutch Hacking Health was held in the first two weeks of April, with health care hackathons organized in five cities (Amsterdam, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, and Utrecht). I am proud to be contributing to the event on behalf of Janssen.
Creative Solutions
A hackathon works a little like a pressure cooker. For three days, driven, multidisciplinary teams work toward finding a solution to a challenge in the health care sector. On the last day, they present the end result to a local jury. The worlds of designers, IT specialists, health care professionals, and patients come together to create a fascinating mix.
With his bright red tee-shirt, M. Erik Gerritsen, Secretary-General of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, is a fervent supporter of the Dutch Hacking Health ecosystem.
A hackathon starts with a specific problem. For example, how do you as a patient or a relative of a patient stay on top of what is going on during a hospital stay? Often, it can be difficult to form a complete picture based on the fragmented information you receive from nurses or doctors. Sometimes it can feel like you’re no longer in control. During Dutch Hacking Health 2018, this challenge was successfully addressed by a team at Bravis hospital. Since then, software company ChipSoft and the hospital have been working together to put the improved Mijn Zorgteam patient portal to the test. This is a result that will directly benefit patients and their relatives.
This year, Dutch Hacking Health will focus on specific themes at various locations. Participants in Nijmegen will tackle challenges relating to future-proofing the labor market in the health care sector and local health care provision. In Utrecht, personalized care is top of the agenda. Amsterdam will look at a mix of topics, including delivering the right care in the right place, as well as mental health. Rotterdam and Maastricht have opted for an open format, where participants will be able to look at challenges relating to various topics.
Janssen’s Role
Sponsors’ logos are displayed on all tee-shirts
Innovations that arise from a hackathon or start as an initiative within a hospital can often also be implemented in other hospitals. By looking at these kinds of innovations with the right partners from industry, we can generate additional power to give high-potential innovations that extra boost. Janssen is keen to play a role in this process. With our broad portfolio of innovative medicines, we see it as our responsibility to work together with hospitals, patient organizations, and, for example, tech companies to accelerate the learning process that’s involved in health care innovation and, through these partnerships, to contribute to improving the Dutch health care sector. With this goal in mind, Janssen has this year become a proud national partner of Dutch Hacking Health for the first time, alongside Deloitte, Vosko, Cisco, and the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport.
As a project manager, I will support the organization this year by helping to coordinate the local hackathons at a national level — which will be a great challenge! In the future, we also want to work with the various local organizers and national partners to create a more professional and sustainable national organization.
“With our broad portfolio of innovative medicines, we see it as our responsibility to work together with hospitals, patient organizations, and, for example, tech companies to accelerate the learning process that’s involved in health care innovation”
I know from my own experience how much positive energy there is buzzing around during health care hackathons. You work together with teammates from a wide range of backgrounds and truly learn about the people behind a specific challenge. This way of working helps you produce some truly creative and fitting solutions. At the hackathons, I met people with the same passion. Everyone puts all their effort into coming up with a solution to a challenge instead of focusing on problems. I brought this positive energy back with me when I returned to Janssen. Inspired by last year’s hackathon, I now focus even more on the person/patient in my day-to-day work.
Dutch Hacking Health 2019
Hacking Health Nijmegen organizers: Concha van Rissjel (left) and Robin Hooijer (right)
Early April is when it all begins: In Amsterdam, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, a series of hackathons will take place over two weeks. At each event, you can see on a small scale what we need to do on a large scale to accelerate health care innovation in the Netherlands and to maintain affordability. To sum it up: It’s all about working together. If we take the time to really understand a problem and leverage each other’s strengths, I am convinced that we can find even more innovative and patient-focused solutions.
On our shared journey to the health care of the future, it’s all about the mix.
If you’re curious about the power of the health care hackathon, why not join in? More information about hackathons in the Netherlands can be found here. Click through to the various locations and sign up in your favorite city.
Original text from Sander van Nuland, Project Specialist, Janssen BeNeLux
Our Volunteers Break Silos And Borders
Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit is the first cross-border Hacking Health chapter in the world. It brings together two cities, which comprise a world-class automotive cluster that is reinventing itself as a global leader in health and mobility.
The 100-year-old Ambassador Bridge is iconic of this chapter’s determination to reach across divides and bring creative people together from the tech, health and automotive sectors to collaborate on innovative solutions to healthcare challenges on both sides of the Detroit River.
This chapter fosters innovation across the Canadian-US border
Now entering its fifth year – Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit has drawn over 1,000 participants, connected over 60 partner organizations, sparked a half-dozen start-up companies (CarePRN is one of them) and inspired a cross-border MedHealth Summit that annually matches health start-ups with investors .
There is also Kaitlyn Sheehan—a Registered Nurse— who had an idea for a mobile app that could improve health care on both sides of the Detroit-Windsor border. Read her fabulous story here and how she won a hackathon top award for mobile app design in this previous post.
Gathering automotive & healthcare sectors in the same place?
From left to right: Deborah Livneh, Zain Ismail and Yvonne Pilon, members of the HHWD chapter
After the lights dimmed on a successful MedHealth Summit in downtown Detroit in early 2018, one that featured an electric keynote by celebrated neuropathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu featured in the movie Concussion, the organizers gathered in a boardroom at the Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy at Wayne State University. Many of those gathered had been founders and leaders from Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit – which provided the spark for the Medhealth Summit.
In part, the organizers wanted to debrief on such a successful meeting and chart potential destinations for Medhealth in 2019. This meeting raised the potential of bringing talent from the automotive and health-care sectors together.
A year later, we are happy to report that Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit IV will explore the theme of mobility in the fall. The potential for creative engineers and programmers from General Motors and Google and Lyft to talk healthcare is exciting.
In the video below, Robert C. Brooks, III – a hackathon participant, talks about what the automotive industry can bring to healthcare:
Our Movement Builds Ecosystems of Innovation
At the Medhealth Summit debrief, Stephen Konya, a Senior Innovation Strategist from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT with the United States Department of Health and Human Services, was invited to lead a discussion. He is exploring the growing network of health-related cluster initiatives across the United States – a cluster of clusters – and the opportunity to integrate the MedHealth Summit.
And that is the genius of Hacking Health – connecting thought leaders from health and tech regionally, opening up promising collaboration between previously sequestered sectors and looking beyond the horizon to connect creative problem solvers globally. That’s Hacking Health’s approach.
That’s the magic of a grass-roots movement
Want to support our movement? Join/build your local chapter or make a donation!
Original text from Dr. Irek Kusmierczyk,
City Councillor for Ward 7 in the City of Windsor
Director of Partnerships at WEtech Alliance
Leader of the Hacking Health Windsor-Detroit Chapter
Hacking Health, Innovation Beyond Hackathons
Hacking Health is a not-for-profit organization created in Montreal in 2012 with head office at the CHUM Hospital. We have developed 12 entities across Canada (from Vancouver to St-John’s) and are present in 50+ cities around the world. All these entities (called chapters) are built by multidisciplinary teams of volunteers who want to bring innovation to healthcare and integrate new technologies for the benefit of patients.
All over the world, our 600+ volunteers organize high energy, collaborative competitions such as health hackathons. During these events, we pair healthcare professionals with patients, technologists, designers, entrepreneurs and other experts to build concrete solutions to healthcare challenges – see all future and past events here.
Listen to the interview of Annie Lamontagne, Special Projects Advisor and former Head of Global Growth at Hacking Health.
Listen to the podcast on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher or Youtube.
From fun short events to transformative innovation hubs
The cornerstone of Hacking Health’s global success is the community built in each location. Chapters organize not only one-time weekend hackathons but also meetups and workshops which work as a regular forum for ideation, knowledge exchange, and networking opportunity.
“Not each idea born during a hackathon turns into a company, nor do all participants have entrepreneurial aspirations, but people always make new connections and acquire new knowledge,” says Annie.
Hospitals, like CHUM, partner with Hacking Health with the desire to give medical professionals a different perspective on their problems with the opportunity of building tomorrow’s healthcare. Read the press release about our collaboration with CHUM here.
Health innovation management
As Annie likes to emphasize in the interview, health innovation management is an emerging and evolving science, and even when hospitals are open to new ideas, they might struggle in implementing them into their practice.
“At one time a speech therapist designed a solution for her clinical practice. She did not want to start a company but wanted to see her idea used in her everyday work. Before that was possible, she hit a lot of barriers inside the institution and had to put a lot of effort in justifying the legal requirements, get management approval, etc., to be able to use the solution,” says Annie Lamontagne.
Another successful hackathon participant was Dr. Denis Vincent, an Edmonton-based physician, who suffered a loss of a patient due to a misplaced fax document. He started looking for a solution to prevent such things from ever happening again. At the Hacking Health Edmonton hackathon in 2013, Dr. Vincent created ezReferral, a cloud-based, secure medical referral management tool that keeps all parties on the same page: family doctor, specialist, and patient.
Read other success stories: CarePRN, IUGO Care, EyeWare, Haleo, etc. Just to name a few.
Hacking health uses different approaches for attracting participants from the clinical practice to join the events. One of them is to turn to IT departments inside healthcare institutions to identify the healthcare workers who complain the most. Hacking health sees them as champions — they are those who refuse to accept the status quo and wish to see changes. They usually become the most influential ambassadors of innovations within institutions.
One of the aspects Annie is passionate about is rethinking the inclusion of older healthcare specialists in the innovation processes. “These are people with tremendous knowledge and experience, still wish to be active, and we need to value their participation.”
Some questions addressed during the interview:
- How are hackathons in healthcare evolving over the years?
- Hacking Health is active in 17 countries. What can different chapters learn from each other?
- How to organize a hackathon?
- How to motivate participants to join hackathons?
- How do Hacking health events differ from other digital health events and how do they attract participants?
- How do hackathons in hospitals look like?
- What follows hackathons in clinical settings? Do hospitals adopt change management solutions?
Post in collaboration with Tjaša Zajc, author of Faces of Digital Health