A healthcare Code-a-thon sought to develop ways that healthcare IT can be used to better support underserved populations in the San Francisco region. Among some of the winning solutions were tools to improve care coordination for homeless people. Another developed a voice message system to improve data transparency.
The winners were announced at the Health Technology Forum Innovation Conference where they offered demos. One group that came in the top three was Moxe Health, a Madison,Wisconsin-based company that graduated from Rock Health’s accelerator with a mission to develop healthcare solutions for underserved patients. Co-founded by two former Epic staff, Moxe Health’s Care Note system seeks to provide clinically relevant information for care coordination stripped down to the essentials. The idea is that the person would be given an ID with a phone number and pin. When they pass through a clinic or food pantry, a person there would call the number using the pin and leave a “care message” explaining what treatment or service they were given. The next person in their health support network would also see the previous entries.
Health Technology Forum founder Pronoy Saha organized the event. Dr. Jan Gurley, a physician based in San Francisco who helped organize the event, told MedCity News it approached universities, technology forums and related websites. About 190 developers, coders, hackers physicians and students joined forces to develop different ways to accomplish that people showed up for the Codeathon and organized themselves into 15 teams. Working through the weekend they presented pitches to a team of seven judges.
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Although its focus is the San Francisco region, the competition has national relevance and generated ideas that could help address pain points in underserved communities cross the country.
One thing I found really inspiring about this event was there was a lot of incredible energy and an impressive turnout. People were very thoughtful about their approaches,” said Gurley. “Most people don’t perceive this as a viable area for a code-a-thon. Most nonprofit and safety systems are still paper based. It’s an unaddressed need but until we address communication issues we will be ineffective at preventing people from falling through the safety net.”
