Health hackathon produces collaborative, crowdsourced solutions

When brilliant minds come together, tough problems get solved. Just ask Island Health, which now has a new way to address an issue affecting hundreds of vulnerable Vancouver Island residents after a team led by international business students in the Sardul S. Gill Graduate School at UVic’s Gustavson School of Business cracked the case.

Collaboration was a key element at the first Victoria Health Hackathon this fall. UVic biomedical engineer Stephanie Willerth organized the weekend event specifically to bring together diverse people with wideranging experiences and expertise for 24 heated hours, tackling one of five health-related problems.

The problems ranged from developing a monitoring system to stop hospital patients from falling out of bed, to creating new adaptations for the hand/arm prostheses built by UVic’s internationally acclaimed Victoria Hand Project. Teams picked the problem of their choice and were given three weeks to mull it over, then came together for an intense weekend of trying to find a “hack” to solve the problem.

Please visit here to read the complete article.