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September 2025 saw this year’s WA Health Hackathon take place, culminating over the weekend of September 20 and 21 when participating teams presented their ideas to a very engaged judging panel.
Sponsors and partners provided a range of datasets for participating teams to work with, and they were eager to get started on this year’s challenges;
The datasets were vast (comprising over 200,000 rows of data!) and sponsors and stakeholders issued them alongside 10 initial challenges that were shortlisted to the final three.
The Challenges were rigourously discussed and investigated and interrogated during the initial three online Challenge Workshops, held on September 10 and 11;
From there it was time for the live, in-person events. The Hackathon was hosted at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies building at Curtin University’s Bentley Campus, an ideal space for collaborative work as each team picked their own space and built an area to work in.
First up was the Team Building event on September 19, which Innovation Lead Tim Sondalini described as ‘Excitement and nervousness all blended into one’. “I had to ask the teams to leave at 8:30pm,” he says. “They didn’t want to stop working!”
From 12 initial teams that registered, a final 10 came through with exciting projects, concepts and systems they thought best addressed the Challenges.
The Hackathon weekend itself, held on September 20-21, is where everything comes together. Day one has a definite dual purpose – the first half of the day was full of inquisitiveness, ambiguity and discovery. Then, in the afternoon, participants find their groove and begin to start really working on their prototypes.
Day two is the Finale and award ceremony event. Each team gets a predetermined time to pitch their idea to the judging panel, which makes the day (and participants) full of energy as everyone becomes fully aware of how difficult their challenge is. Judges Matthew Ting, Sarada Lee and Nicole Cikarela threw down the gauntlet, challenging the presenters in turn about the strengths and limitations of their products. Good natured competitiveness and camaraderie ratchet up the tension and the pitches were great fun for both the teams and over 70 audience members.
Congratulation to all our winners;
🏆 Grand Prize – Urban Threshold: Comprehensive patient triage, bed management, and simulation tool responding to the Department of Health challenge.
🔧 Technical Achievement – Ground Truth: Fall-detection app that triggers alerts and responses — a unique take on EMHS’s challenge.
🎖️Honourable Mention – Medicoders: Dashboard and patient interaction tool for the Department of Health.
🎖️Honourable Mention – Hack to Health: Solution addressing HBF’s challenge on temperature stress and cardiovascular disease prevention.
But the real winners were the clinical and hospital patients and health consumers across WA – sponsors HBF and the WA Department of Health and partner East Metropolitan Health Service heard about some of the most innovative ideas that will help them solve problems affecting their service delivery in the real world.
Read more on our WA Health Hackathon 2025 blog post or on Linkedin, and see below for all the pics of the event.
Hackathons are collaborative and innovation focussed events that see participants build prototype solutions to solve challenges. When we say ‘hack’ in this context we mean to encourage quick solving something through a prototype, not breaking into a software system.
Solutions are generally software-based programs, but they can also be new designs or even insightful improvements for processes and other issues. Given the time constraints (you’ll only have a week!) A prototype can be as simple as a small piece of code, a website or even a presentation. The point is to have fun helping our community.
The WA Health Hackathon 2025 is an annual hackathon that is focused on improving the health services available to West Australians. This year the Hackathon will revolve around a Hackathon Weekend (19 to 21 September).
To support the innovation that will take place over the weekend, a series of deep-dive presentations to help teams understand the Challenges will also take place during the Hackathon week. The Hackathon will conclude with the Pitches and Awards on Sunday 21 September 2025.
We will require that participants are part of a team for the WA Health Hackathon 2025. We’ve noticed that participants have more fun as part of a team and that the prototypes which are built tend to be more impactful.
We are running a casual team building event as part of the Hackathon Launch on Friday 19 September, which we encourage you to come along to.
Yes, but keep in mind the following requirements:
You will need to register your team and the Challenge you are exploring in person on Saturday 20 September at the Hackathon.
Yes. Data will be provided for each of the challenges by the challenge sponsor. Teams are also encouraged to seek out and use other open data sources that might help them validate their solution.
Participants will be able to access the various data sets through the WA Health Hackathon Data Hosting Portal which will be opened at the launch event.
No, but if you are under the age of 18, you will need to be accompanied by a guardian at all times.
This will be an event where we explore how new technologies and data science techniques can help solve major issues affecting WA. We’d strongly recommend bringing along a laptop and a collaborative mindset!
The Hackathon Weekend will be held at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies Building on Curtin University’s Bentley Campus.
Lunch and some drinks will be provided over the course of the Hackathon Weekend.
No! We’re completely realistic that everyone has other priorities. This is supposed to be a fun event where you can give back to our community by solving impactful Challenges. This isn’t supposed to feel like work. If you can attend a Workshop then please do so. We anticipate that it will be very useful for you to talk with mentors and explore the supporting data sets.
We do anticipate that some teams will begin working on their prototypes before the Hackathon Weekend and that’s great, but you’re under no obligation to do so.
Contact WADSIH with any questions about The WA Health Hackathon 2025 on our LinkedIn page or by email, or email Hackathon organiser and WADISH Innovation Lead Tim Sondalini.
The WA Health Hackathon 2025 will be located at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies on the Curtin University campus, which is marked on the map below. The Hackathon will be taking place in Rooms 211.222 and 211. 223 across the weekend of September 19, 20 and 21.
Contact WADSIH with any questions about The WA Health Hackathon 2025 on our LinkedIn page or by email, or email Hackathon organiser and WADSIH Innovation Lead Tim Sondalini.
