Finally, the Atlanta Medical Hackathon will have its inaugural hack October 19th-20th. It will be held at the Pediatric Technology Center at Georgia Tech. The hackathon is open to students and graduate students focusing on information technology or medicine.

Medicine and technology go hand in hand but professionals of each speak a different language. The professions have different workflows, different standards, and different needs. The Atlanta Medical Hackathon plans to bring students from those different professions together to learn how to work with one another and remove the current barriers that exist.

The challenges of the hackathon are as follows:

• Navigating Healthcare – Patients have great difficulty knowing where to get the care they need at the right time. Part of the challenge comes with having an incredibly complex health care delivery system. To help patients, create new tools to improve patients navigate through the health care system and obtain access to community based care, wellness programs, and other ancillary services that support individuals improve their health.
• Transparency in Healthcare – Transparency, whether cost, data, or anything else, has been a great issue in health care. Without information patients cannot make the right decisions on treatments, doctors, or labs/imaging amongst a long list of other things such as wait times. Tackle problems in data transparency to allow for patients to discover what medical information is around them (providers, insurance acceptance, pricing, wait times, etc.). Solutions should consider open access and HIPPA compliance.
• Accessible Healthcare – Patients need to be supported by tools that will educate and empower them to make the right lifestyle choices and help them stick to their treatment plans. They get some information from their physicians or other sources but a single source would dispel a lot of mixed messages and help patients follow suit with decisions that support a health life. Create a solution that allow patients to make better health decisions allowing for self-management of disease and condition and to know when to contact their medical provider. Think creatively on how to change patients’ thinking from “The doctor will see you now” to “The patient will see you now”,
• Medical Imaging – Create innovative solutions using imaging technologies and data analytics to provide better patient care.
• Transitioning to Adult Healthcare – Changing doctors is never easy. When you’re a teenager new to advocating for your own health care, or one who has a chronic illness like diabetes or cystic fibrosis, it can be even more challenging to make the transition. Create new tools to assist pediatricians, family physicians, and internists to support all adolescents, including those with special health care needs, as they transition to an adult model of health care.