Hacking Health: This weekend-long event is the first of its kind in Canada to bring together web and mobile programmers with professionals from the medical community to create new digital healthcare technologies
February 21, 2012
First Edition of Hacking Health’s Hackathon to be held February 24-25 in Montreal with special guest speaker Jean-Luc Neptune from Health 2.0
MONTREAL, February 21, 2012 - The inaugural Hacking Health event will take place February 24-25 at McGill’s Thomson House (3650 McTavish) and is expected to draw over 150 participants. The Hackathon is a collaborative computer programming environment where web designers and developers will work with doctors, nurses, clinic managers and administrators to rapidly prototype digital solutions and healthcare innovations.
Hacking Health is designed to improve healthcare by pairing technological innovators with health professionals to build realistic, human-centric solutions to front-line healthcare problems. “The event bridges the gap between doctors, nurses and surgeons who know what technologies are needed or missing within the industry but do not have immediate access to a network of tech developers and designers who can build the digital technologies they are looking for,” explained Jeeshan Chowdhury, Hacking Health co-founder and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Alberta and Oxford.
Hacking Health is a grassroots effort that connects frontline health practitioners with the technical talent required to create targeted solutions. Over the course of two days, participants will form teams and build prototypes that can be tested in clinics or hospitals. $1,600 in prizes will be awarded and teams will compete for titles such as “Best mobile app” and “Most engaging app for patients.”
Dr. Trevor Chan is a medical professional who will be attending the event. He will be working with a team of hackers to create an app that uses geolocation to facilitate house call requests from patients. “The medical community has shown a huge amount of interest in this particular hackathon because, to date, the top down approach to innovating healthcare by governments and big corporations has not worked,” says Chowdhury.
It is exactly this bottom-up approach to innovation that has increased the buzz around this event and has sponsors clamouring to help support the efforts of this pioneering group. “Hacking Health is an event we are extremely proud of,” says Luc Sirois, Nightingale’s Vice President and General Manager in Quebec. “This type of blue-ocean thinking is a clear example of what Nightingale as an organization stands for: a fresh new way of challenging the status-quo. Merging healthcare with technology is exactly what the sector needs and what we strive to do every day in the field. I am optimistic that this is merely the beginning of more great things to come.”
Hacking Health begins Friday, February 24 at 6pm. Health professionals will pitch business and product ideas to 160 programmers, who will then choose the best ideas and form teams to build prototypes over the following 24 hours.
The press is invited to attend on Saturday to meet teams as they work on their projects. Interviews will be available with the event organizers, hackers, healthcare professionals and judges.
The press is also invited to attend the Closing Reception from 6-8 pm on Saturday. At this reception, teams will present their prototypes to their peers before a panel of judges. Special invitees from government agencies, the healthcare industry, and the financial sector will be present.
To register for Hacking Health visit www.hackinghealthca.eventbrite.com
For more information visit: www.hackinghealth.ca
Judges
Dr. Jean Luc Neptune MD / MBA from Health 2.0
Dr. Sathy Rajasekharan from the McGill Centre for Biomedical Innovation
Luc Sirois from Nightingale Informatix Corporation
Sponsors
Platinum: Nightingale Informatix Corporation, and BDC
Gold: McGill Centre for Biomedical Innovation, Radialpoint, McGill Faculty of Medicine, and Sauvé Scholars
Silver: KPMG, Montréal Invivo, and Yellow Pages
Bronze: Github, Real Ventures, and Name.com
Supporters
Maclean’s, Canadian Healthcare Network, Ile Sans fil, Montréal Ouvert, MTL StartupTalent, and Montréal Python
About Hacking Health
Hacking Health is a group of young professionals with experience spanning medicine, law, technology and policy who recognized the necessity of opening communication and contact between healthcare professionals and the tech world so that the latter can facilitate the creation of mobile technologies better suited to the real needs of patients and providers in healthcare.
Hacking Health hopes to foster an ecosystem of health tech innovation in Canada and build an industry of innovative startups to make healthcare more accessible and efficient.
Media Contacts:
Lisa Guimond
press@hackinghealth.ca
514-774-2170
Andrew Cleland
andrew@hackinghealth.ca
514-691-9618
