TechPad

What a weekend! The Hokie Health Code a Thon (and the longest hashtag ever used on twitter) wrapped up this past Saturday. After 24 solid hours of great speakers, coding by talent developers, and engaging pitches–our first code a thon had gone off without a hitch!

At TechPad, we’re numbers people so check these numbers out: 14 speakers, 11  teams, 27 team members, 80+ attendees, 1 Aneesh Chopra, 20 pizzas, 20 liters of caffeine, 3 dozen donuts, 28 hours of geeking out on healthcare innovation and 1000s of perfectly commented and bug-free code!

A very special thank you goes to our sponsors: RBTC, TechPad, Advisory Board Company, Carilion clinic, Centra Health, Epic, Intel, 1901 Group, Altruista Health, Cox Business, HiMSS, Medical Facilities of America, Montgomery County, VA Economic Development, Rackspace, Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology & VT Entrepreneur Club

Check out our winners below:

Intel Grand Prize Winner ($2,500):

HeyRecall is a subscription based service that continually synchronizes with the FDA.gov recall data. When users opt to the service, they set an alert profile made up of conditions that if satisfied by any of the upcoming FDA recalls that would trigger notifications that are sent to their email and cell phone as a text message. They take advantage of valuable data for their users’ families safety. They came in with a blank slate and were challenged by getting to work on a completely new domain and a totally different nature of data.  Remarkably, grand prize winner is the only single person team: Hussein Ahmed.

$500 Prize winners:

LivingOrgans aims to solve the kidney donor deficit, the cost of patients on dialysis, and increase the number of people receiving kidneys. Their inspiration came from friends who have struggled with kidney problems and the inefficiencies of kidney matching. The team formed after the idea pitching session yesterday afternoon and they, too, had the biggest challenge of staying up all night.

Geomedicine is developing the HypochondriAPP to provide a realtime and baseline information for various environmental and health indicators based on an individual’s location history. The information can be used to improve awareness and decision making regarding place and health—the choice of where we recreate, live, and work. The team was formed prior to the event but added another developer after the idea pitching activity. Their biggest challenge was narrowing down the problems to develop while distilling the essence of the application in this selection.

Hygeia took the idea that something as human health cannot be enumerated by any single health record or database schema. They believe that people think and operate with natural (spoken) language every day, so we should structure our systems to operate in that space as well. Their system is a Siri-meets-Wolfram Alpha-style service with a web API and native iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry applications to predict, diagnose, and understand the human condition the very same way that we do. They thought of the core product a week ago, but have added features and discovered our design during the code a thon. They’re both TechPad residents, which is how their team formed and their biggest challenge is staying focused during the 24 hour period.

MedicalBox is essentially a filebox for patients’ medical records. They found their idea based on how people generate a gigantic amount of data about their health, their solution allows you to store the data in a secure, centralized location in the cloud. It also enables you to select which hospitals in your area have access to your personal records. They came into the competition with little to no ideas about what they wanted to build and no code base coming into the code a thon but they were inspired were the speakers that presented on Friday. They formed their team using Friendster and CouchSurfing.com, well not really, but they’ve taken a lot of Computer Science classes together. Their largest challenge was putting together a marketable idea and dividing up the parts of that needed to be constructed.

Private Practice is looking to develop a data metric based on clinical quality measures in their existing EHR product to decrease preterm birth through prevention-based checklists. They came to the code a thon with a team of individuals whom had worked together previously as well as an EHR product that was already developed for maternity care providers. They all work together when they’re not coding for 24 hours and their biggest challenge was having too many great ideas and not enough time.