An exciting way to produce 30 potential solutions to problems related to health communications.
The March 2018 Gupta Family Hackathon for Health Communication brought together more than 120 students and professionals at University of Michigan, as well as community members. In just over 24 hours of work, teams drawn from the worlds of clinical care, health sciences, science, engineering, digital technology, communication, business, and design created new ways to overcome gaps in getting the right information to the right people at the right time and place.
The hackathon was organized by the U-M Institute for Health Policy and Innovation with support from U-M alumni Sanjay Gupta, M.D. and his wife Rebecca.
The interdisciplinary teams worked late into the night, then started early the next morning to complete their project concepts, designs, prototypes and business plans. Thirty new approaches to real-world problems related to health communications resulted. All of them have potential to keep moving forward toward real-world application.
Four of the ideas emerged as winners, and the one that was determined to have the highest potential impact is an innovation to facilitate interprofessional and patient communication. “Spool,” as its team called it, is a platform to enable real-time communication between health care providers and patients, while also feeding documentation into electronic medical records. Spool team members are Julia Brennan, Andrew Gonzalez, Katherine Hoffman, Gloria Kim, David Lorch, Breanne Melow, Rosemary Putler, Jonathan Skaza.
More about the Gupta Family Hackathon for Health Communication.