WA Health Hackathon Week 2021 brought together over 60 data & digital specialists and students to apply their technical and problem-solving skills to a wide range of healthcare challenges put forward by members of the WA healthcare ecosystem.
WADSIH worked with clinicians, medical researchers, and other healthcare professionals across WA (both public and private), as well as academics from several WA universities, to identify and define WA-specific real world healthcare challenges to be explored in the Hackathon.
This initiative allowed participants to work collaboratively with domain experts (clinicians, researchers, and other healthcare professionals) to develop desirable, viable and feasible solutions to WA’s healthcare challenges. Participants also had the opportunity to attend training sessions on design thinking and need identification in the healthcare sector, as well as training from specialists at AWS on solution architecture, to give them the tools they needed to ideate, prototype and pitch their innovations.
The Solution
The WA Health Hackathon comprised of 18 multidisciplinary teams brought together to develop digital and data driven solutions to the healthcare challenges presented. Teams met over the weekend to work on their respective challenges before pitching to our judges – Dr Radhouane Aniba, Head of Research Data Strategy Telethon Kids Institute; Dr Jacqueline Alderson Tech Director, Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab UWA; and Dr Tracey Wilkinson Director Stakeholder Engagement WA MTPConnect WA Life Sciences Innovation Hub.
The judges considered the following components when evaluating the proposed solutions:
All teams came up with high quality, innovative and practical solutions. The winning team’s challenge was End of life prognosis, an issue surrounding the difficulties in identifying which patients are in the last 6-12 months of their life, resulting in these patients not receiving well-coordinated, high quality palliative care. The team proposed a predictive model to improve early end of life prognoses, enabling greater patient control over their treatment and vastly improving their remaining quality.
NEXT STEPS
We would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which the WADSIH office is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation.
