Hack for Digital Healthcare 2022 wrap

Telstra Health held its latest Hack for Digital Healthcare Hackathon in June 2022. The one-day event saw more than 70 people come together to form eight teams who were challenged with tackling seven real-life challenges faced in our health and aged care systems.

Participants from government, health and aged care providers and Telstra Health came together united by a passion to innovate.

Technology and design professionals, healthcare specialists, and people from various other disciplines in health technology and medicine joined forces, both virtually and in-person, to create innovative solutions for some of the biggest problems in modern healthcare.

Day one of the Hackathon saw teams collaborate to ideate a solution, which they had one week to finesse before pitching to the judges in a ‘Shark Tank’ style finale.

The unique solutions presented on the final day of the Hackathon included:

• Simple portable devices – a ‘clinic in a box’ – to be completed at home to compliment telehealth consultations, improving diagnostic accuracy and reducing time to diagnosis and treatment regardless of a person’s location.
• A room allocation solution for outpatient settings to make room utilisation more efficient and improve patient care.
• A solution to address ambulance ramping through virtual emergency departments (ED), directing non-urgent care away from EDs.
• Using artificial intelligence (AI) to triage referrals.
• A solution to encourage nurses and carers to re-join the care economy, enabling them to use their skills, work flexibly and fill workforce gaps by connecting employers to appropriately qualified job seekers, reducing the administrative burden.
• A single source of truth for medical retrievals in remote and regional communities to enable better information sharing, better planning and quality urgent care with timely information at the healthcare team’s fingertips.
• An app which provides patients with chronic disease care plans, reminders and gamification to help patients better manage their conditions and follow regimens.

The guiding principles of the Hackathon were used by the judges to determine the winning solution, and these included innovation​, teamwork and collaboration​, digitalisation of health and aged care​, a focus on the needs of clinicians and patients, and​ the degree of potential impact and value created for the health and aged care sectors.​

The winning team ‘404 team name not found’ were awarded for their brilliant ideas to tackle the skills shortage in the aged and disability sector. In a very close podium finish ‘It’s not a bug, it’s a feature’ came second with an app for people with chronic conditions. Third place and the technical wizardry prize was awarded to ‘Nik Naks’ for the team’s AI solution for triaging referrals.

Remarkably, several of the solutions that were proposed are influencing real life solutions of some of the organisations who participated in the Hackathon.

In addition to the problem-solving, teamwork and stellar collaboration throughout the 2022 Hackathon, the final event truly harnessed creativity from each of the teams, with many participants donning dress up props and costumes when delivering their final presentation.

Keep an eye out in Telstra Health’s eHealth Insights newsletter, in addition to the Telstra Health website and our LinkedIn or Twitter channels, for future updates on these types of activity.