Hacking Health Toronto

Just this past weekend I attended a Health Hackathon at MarS Discovery District. It was a three day hackathon that began with 35 pitches delivered by individuals in Toronto's healthcare community. We then formed teams by choosing projects we were interested in and then worked on solving the issue throughout the weekend. On the final day we were to submit a working demo and deliver a 2 minute pitch about our solution.

I joined a team working on creating an integrated care pathway (ICP) model for a concurrent disorder, Major Depression and Alcohol Dependence. An ICP has clear guidelines, protocols and algorithms of what standard care should look like for a patient with this diagnosis. It is also a vehicle to bridge evidence based research with evidence based practice. The pathways incorporate process maps, checklists, medication algorithms etc.

Our group decided on creating a digital tool that aimed to help the clinical team keep track of client outcomes, assess trends in clinical outcome and provide a pathway dashboard to illustrate 'where is the patient in their care?' And 'how they are doing'

At the end, we developed a visual tool called 'care way' to capture information and relay it back in real time. In it's first phase, the tool acts as a communication tool between staff to ensure reduction in redundancy and improvement in collaboration. The tool is used to capture patient self assessments and provide a visual dashboard to share with the patient on their road to recovery.

Our (super!) team was made up of three healthcare professionals, two developers, and two designers. This was my first time working closely with developers and has allowed me to understand what their capacity is and as a result how as a designer, I can work better with them. It was also my first time designing a web-app. I didn't think the transition from the experience of using a product to the experience of using just a screen was that different, but it was. The canvas was different, screen size was important, and it's so easy to make the interface look like it came from the windows 3.0 era.

I also discovered that I'm quite able with keeping good communication. Our team worked separately, but always met up at key points to make sure that nobody was doing double work especially with the time limit we had. I enjoyed prioritizing the work and organising the heap of information to digest and relay it back to the team. I'm not sure if that is a special skill or not, but it helped keep everyone on track.

The result of our 2day project is posted on www.carmenliu.com/hhicp.html