Hackathon Event Research Articles

Hacking teamwork in health care: Addressing adverse effects of ad hoc team composition in critical care medicine.

The continued need for improved teamwork in all areas of health care is widely recognized. The present article reports on the application of a hackathon to the teamwork problems specifically associated with ad hoc team formation in rapid response teams. Hackathons-problem-solving events pioneered in computer science-are on the rise in health care management. The focus of these events tends to be on medical technologies, however, with calls for improvements in management practices as general recommendations. The hackathon reported here contributes to health care management practice by addressing improvements in teamwork as the focal problem. The hackathon event took place over 2.5 days in conjunction with an academic conference focused on group research. Three teams comprised of practicing healthcare professionals, academic researchers and students developed solutions to problems of ad hoc team formation in rapid response teams. The event fulfilled several goals. The teams produced three distinct, yet complementary solutions that were backed by both field-based experience and solid research evidence. The event provided the opportunity for two-way translation of research and practice through direct collaboration among key stakeholders. The hackathon produced long term effects through establishing or strengthening collaborations, dissemination of the ideas through presentations, workshops, and publications, and changes in participantsâ work practices. The event demonstrated that hackathons, classically focused on technology, can also offer a spur to innovation around organizational processes. The article provides advice for organizing other hackathons focused on similar topics. The solutions offered by the participants in the event yields the clear insight that multipronged solutions for emergency-oriented teamwork are needed. The hackathon highlighted the scaled of collaboration and effort needed to tackle the many complexities in health care that impact outcomes for providers, patients, and health organizations.

Developing a Digital Solution for Dengue Through Epihack: Qualitative Evaluation Study of a Five-Day Health Hackathon in Sri Lanka.

BackgroundDengue is a mosquito-borne viral disease that has increasingly affected Sri Lanka in recent years. To address this issue, dengue surveillance through increasingly prevalent digital surveillance applications has been suggested for use by health authorities and the general public. Epihack Sri Lanka was a 5-day hackathon event organized to develop a digital dengue surveillance tool.ObjectiveThe goal of the research was to examine the effectiveness of a collaborative hackathon that brought together information technology (IT) and health experts from around the globe to develop a solution to the dengue pandemic in Sri Lanka.MethodsEthnographic observation and qualitative informal interviews were conducted with 58 attendees from 11 countries over the 5-day Epihack to identify the main factors that influence a collaborative hackathon. Interviews were transcribed and coded based on grounded theory.ResultsThree major themes were identified during the Epihack Sri Lanka event: engagement, communication, and current disease environment. Unlike other hackathons, Epihack had no winners or prizes and was collaborative rather than competitive, which worked well in formulating a variety of ideas and bringing together volunteers with a sense of civic duty to improve public health. Having health and IT experts work together concurrently was received positively and considered highly beneficial to the development of the product. Participants were overall very satisfied with the event, although they thought it could have been longer. Communication issues and cultural differences were observed but continued to decrease as the event progressed. This was found to be extremely important to the efficiency of the event, which highlighted the benefit of team-bonding exercises. Bringing expert knowledge and examples of systems from around the world benefited the creation of new ideas. However, developing a system that can adapt and cater to the local disease environment is important in successfully developing the concepts.ConclusionsEpihack Sri Lanka was successful in bringing together health and IT experts to develop a digital solution for dengue surveillance. The collaborative format achieved a variety of fruitful ideas and may lead to more hackathons working in this way in the future. Good communication, participant engagement, and stakeholder interest with adaptation of ideas to complement the current environment are vital to achieve the goals of the event.

An Exploratory Study Examining Group Dynamics in a Hackathon

Pairing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in a hackathon is beginning to receive attention. VR and AR tools have the potential to support different types of skill sets and help promote synergistic interconnections between team members. Since little is known about how a hackathon can contribute towards group dynamics, this exploratory study compared team dynamics that occurred in multidisciplinary groups during a weekend hackathon. Twenty-two multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate students, in addition to two campus professionals, participated in the event held on a mid-size university in the South-Central Midwest of the United States. The groups were deliberately created by the research team to support different skill sets and disciplines based upon the in-group bias framework. Observations and video recordings occurred throughout the 2-day hackathon event. The non-obtrusive-participant observations resulted in noticeable differences between group dynamics in collaboration, teamwork, work style, and group presentations.

3144 Exploring communication and collaboration at the Mount Sinai Health Hackathon: a social network analysis

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: The study aims to (1) investigate the structural patterns of professional communication that exist at the Mount Sinai Health Hackathon (2) explore if and how the professional networks of the participants change after engaging in the Mount Sinai Health Hackathon (3) explore any associations between the characteristics of participants’ professional networks and successful innovation development. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: The recruitment pool consists of all 78 Mount Sinai Health Hackathon 2018 participants. Characteristics of the social network of Health Hackathon participants are assessed via an SNA data collection instrument at three time points: T1 directly before the Health Hackathon event, T2 directly after the event, T3 six months post-event. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Institutional Review Board approved this study as exempt. In order to explore patterns of communication between Health Hackathon participants during event, whole network data is collected at T2. Participants are provide with a roster of Mount Sinai Health hackathon participant names and asked to report the nature, frequency and perceived importance of their interaction with each of the other participants over the duration of the 48 hour event. In order capture any network change in the wider professional networks of the individual participants, known as “ego networks”, participants are asked to complete an SNA ego network survey at time points T1, T2 and T3. Open ended questions asked participants to report up to 20 people they consider being most important to them in their professional network and record the professional background of each person, the nature of the communication and the importance of each person to their success. Finally, at T3 participants are also asked to report on their project success (determined by businesses formed, filed provisional patents, financial income generation). This will be reviewed in relation to their social network data, to see if there is any relationship between the two. Data is analyzed using the specialized SNA software, UCiNET, which creates network sociograms to visualize network data. Descriptive statistics are used to report individual-level characteristics of respondents.RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: To describe the structural patterns of communication at each time point, the following network-level indices are calculated: density (a measure of network cohesion), degree centrality (how many connections the individual has), betweenness centrality (whether the individual provides connections to other people in a network) and closeness centrality (how close the individual is to other people in the network). Network sociograms are generated for each time point to provide a visualization of the network. To explore the hypothesis that participating in the Mount Sinai Health Hackathon increases diversity of a professional network, analysis will focus on whether and how network-level indices change pre- and post- Hackathon. It will also explore any association between network characteristics and project success. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Social Network Analysis of the Mount Sinai Health Hackathon provides an understanding about the structure of relationships that are formed as a result of participation in this event. Although, the design of this study does not allow for inferences of causality, the SNA approach enables an in-depth exploration of Hackathon participants’ professional networks, how these evolve over time and how certain network characteristics may be associated with project success. This information will be used to inform the development, content and delivery of future Health Hackathon initatives.

Planning an innovation marathon at an infectious disease conference with results from the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance 2016 Hackathon

A hackathon is best described as an ‘innovation marathon’. Derived from the words ‘hacking’ and ‘marathon’, it brings together multidisciplinary teams to collaborate intensely over a short period of time to define a problem, devise a solution, and design a working prototype. International scientific meetings are conducive to successful hackathons, providing an audience of expert professionals who describe challenges and ensure the proposed solutions address end-user needs. Collaborations with local organizations and academic centers are crucial to attracting complementary specialties such as IT advisors, engineers, and entrepreneurs to develop sustainable projects. The core process of first identifying and deconstructing a problem followed by solution iteration is applicable to challenges at workplaces around the world. Ultimately, this model can be used to drive innovation and catalyze change in the global health community. The planning, execution, and outcomes of a hackathon event organized in conjunction with the International Meeting on Emerging Diseases and Surveillance (IMED 2016) are described in this article. Physicians, public health practitioners, veterinarians, IT professionals, engineers, and entrepreneurs came together for 2days to develop solutions at the intersection of emerging infectious diseases and climate change. Projects that resulted from the IMED 2016 Hackathon included environmental impact assessment software for humanitarian organization relief efforts; enhanced communication tools to prevent disease outbreaks; a participatory mobile application to speed the elimination of rabies in Indonesia; integrated disease surveillance platforms; and an improved search function for infectious disease outbreak reports in the ProMED-mail network.

An IoT and Wearable Technology Hackathon for Promoting Careers in Computer Science

This paper explores the use of a constructivist 21st-century learning model to implement a week-long workshop, delivered as a “hackathon,” to encourage preuniversity teenagers to pursue careers in STEM, with a particular emphasis on computer science. For Irish preuniversity students, their experience of computing can vary from word processing to foundational programming, and while many schools are looking to introduce more ICT into the classroom, many students are left with a narrow view of what computer science is all about. Twenty-one students participated in the workshop and completed pre- and post-surveys, and a free word association exercise in the areas of computing and careers in computing. Analysis revealed that students' motivation to learn about the design process, programming, inputs and outputs, and wearable technology (wearables)/Internet of Things (IoT) increased following participation. There were also increases in confidence in inputs and outputs and wearables/IoT following participation, as well as changes in the computing word associations, with students associating computing more with computer programming terms rather than general terms such as the Internet. The findings suggest that the combination of a hackathon event and a model for 21st century learning can be effective in motivating and increasing the self-efficacy of preuniversity teenagers in a number of emerging technological contexts such as IoT and wearables.

Hacking the hospital environment: young adults designing youth-friendly hospital rooms together with young people with cancer experiences.

There is a need for youth-friendly hospital environments as the ward environment may affect both patient satisfaction and health outcomes. To involve young people in designing youth-friendly ward environment. We arranged a design competition lasting 42 h (Hackathon). Students in architecture, design, engineering, communication and anthropology participated (27 young adults) - forming eight groups. Adolescents and young adults (AYA) with current or former cancer experience participated as sparring partners. We provided workspace and food during the weekend. The groups presented their products to a jury and relevant stakeholders. The groups created eight unique design concepts. The young designers were extremely flexible listening to ideas and experiences from the young patients, which led to common features including individual and flexible design, privacy in two-bed wardrooms and social contact with other hospitalized AYA. The winning project included an integrated concept for both wardrooms and the AYA day room, including logos and names for the rooms and an 'energy wall' in the day room. A hackathon event was an effective mode of youth participation. The design concepts and ideas were in line with current evidence regarding pleasing hospital environment and youth-friendly inpatient facilities and may be applicable to other young patients.

EvoIO: Community-driven standards for sustainable interoperability

AbstractInteroperability is the property that allows systems to work together independent of who created them, or how or for what purpose they were implemented. It is crucial for aggregating data from different online resources and for integrating different kinds of data. Interoperability is based on effective standards that become and remain broadly adopted. We argue that to develop and apply such standards for evolutionary and biodiversity data sustainably, we need a community-driven, open, and participatory approach. With the goal to build such an approach, the EvoIO collaboration emerged in 2009 from several NESCent-sponsored activities. EvoIO aims to be a nucleating center for developing, applying and disseminating interoperability technology that connects and coordinates between stakeholders, developers, and standards bodies.Members of the EvoIO group have harnessed a variety of collaborative events to successfully build an initial stack of interoperability technologies that is owned by the community and open to participation. The stack addresses syntax, semantics, and programmable services, and at present includes the following components: NeXML (http://nexml.org), a NEXUS-inspired XML format that is validatable yet extensible; CDAO (http://www.evolutionaryontology.org), an ontology of comparative data analysis formalizing the semantics of evolutionary data and metadata; and PhyloWS (http://evoinfo.nescent.org/PhyloWS), a web- services interface standard for querying, retrieving, and referencing phylogenetic data on the web. Beyond demonstration prototypes, reference implementations of EvoIO stack technologies are starting to appear in production use. Aside from producing such information artefacts, EvoIO devotes much of its energy to applying principles of communication and organization that result in open and inclusive processes of community science. One of the key tools employed by EvoIO is the hackathon event format. Hackathons are highly collaborative, hands-on working meetings that catalyze practical innovation, train researchers, and foster cohesion as well as a sense of shared ownership in the results. In summary, we find that broad community participation, buy-in, and ownership are critical for developing interoperability in a sustainable fashion, and there are approaches and tools that can foster these effectively.