The occasion began with a review of why this event is occurring and why HSX MarketStreet exists: to facilitate the exchange of patient clinical data for the betterment of patients’ health and healthcare management. The staff encouraged the hackers to be as creative as possible while developing their solutions, with the only strict requirement being that an exchange of patient data must be incorporated in their proposed innovation or application. After the initial introduction and welcome to the event, the hackers put their heads together to exchange ideas and form teams based on common interests.
The HSX MarketStreet Consumer Health-Data-Exchange Hackathon
provided opportunity for hackers to expose their ideas to
big players in the Philadelphia health IT sphere.
The hackathon had available to participants the HSX MarketStreet Sandbox APIs, built by the HSX innovation team. These APIs allowed the hackers to access the Sandbox Clinical Data Repository (CDR), a replica of the production HSX CDR, but populated with fictional patient data for testing purposes.
The hackers were in the hacking room before 8:00 am and until after 11:00 pm each night, diligently working on their projects. The enthusiastic and determined teams impressed HSX staff and summit spectators with their creativity and ingenuity, as they devised a variety of solutions covering a range of problems currently facing the healthcare IT space.
Solutions included:
- a platform to track whether diabetic patients were following through on their recommended annual retinal exams
- an integration with Fitbit to allow affective-disorder patients to self-report on their mood, track sleep and vitals, and more, in an effort to prevent or detect an upcoming manic episode for the patient
- and use of blockchain technology to track patients’ immunization status.
Throughout the Hackathon, announcements were made at the Health IT Summit for summit attendees to stop by the room next door and see the hackers in action, and to ask about their solutions and what benefit they would provide to healthcare.
The runner-up for top Hackathon prize was the team from GeneIntel, a preventative and diagnostic healthcare service based in Philadelphia that gathers and organizes patient-centric family medical history for a genetics-informed health profile. The team worked on a platform aimed at eliminating the guess-work of patient-reported medical family history, using a consent-based model to retrieve family medical records from HSX MarketStreet. The intent is to allow a patient’s provider to use this information to detect genetic disease and proactively assess the patient’s inheritance of genetic conditions.
The judges awarded the first-place prize to the Digital Innovation and Consumer Experience (DICE) team from Jefferson Health System, which created a platform/B2B app to enable, as they described it, the “efficient and responsible transfer of medical information to aid businesses and institutions during the onboarding process.” Through this platform, individuals’ immunizations, allergies, and conditions could be easily transferred to a new [Text Box: 1st place prize = $1000 and an opportunity to bring the hacked application to market as a MarketStreet pilot 2nd place prize = $700 3rd place prize = $300] employer, camp, or school, eliminating the need for manual medical records retrieval or duplication of examinations and medical-form completion. As the first-place winner of the Hackathon, the Jefferson team will have an opportunity to bring its Hackathon solution to market as a pilot on HSX MarketStreet!
The hackathon was intended as the first in the HSX MarketStreet Hackathon Series, continuing to build upon HSX’s mission of improving patients’ well-being by allowing appropriate and productive exchange of patient data, and empowering patients to actively engage in their own healthcare management.