Winners of the NYC Code-a-thon
This weekend, Health 2.0 teamed up with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University (DBMI) for a two-day code-a-thon in the Big Apple. The event aimed to bringing together developers, designers, innovators, students and entrepreneurs to build exciting new applications and tools to improve health care. Despite the un-seasonably warm weather, we ended up with a great room of NYC technologists for a full weekend of creative health hacking and some amazing winners. What’s even better, is that each team walked away with a cash prize, a well shot demo video for their portfolio and an expanded network of contacts in the budding field of health tech.
The day started off with an ideation session and active group discussion. Speakers - ranging from venture capitalists to bio-informaticians - soon took the stage to provide expert incite into health tech start-ups and how they see the market evolving in both New York and the rest of the world. Informed by the morning’s events, teams then jumped into coding and, after only a short 48 hours, Health 2.0 was pleased to award prizes to the following projects:
1st place went to PubMeddit who won $2,000 and will be heading to San Francisco this Fall to present on Health 2.0′s Main Stage. Dr. Henry Wei and Rajiev Timal built an application that layers socially-driven search over biomedical literature and research databases, e.g. PubMed.gov/MEDLINE and ClinicalTrials.gov. This augments the search results with the experience of prior searchers, and offer a public commenting system. Dr. Wei explained that, “in essence, we intend to ‘democratize’ the editorial review of medical literature, while saving time and effort for less proficient users interested in levering the search experience of other expert users.”
2nd place was awarded to both DonorsConnect and Counting On US. Both teams won $1,000 and will soon have demo videos hosted on Health 2 TV. Ariq Azad and Vikas Vavilala built DonorsConnect to help patients launch focused social media campaigns to reach potential donors outside of their social networks. The platform helps patients craft a story, identify an empathetic audience and launch a viral campaign. Counting On US, built by Michael Carroll, Minghen Tsai, Bastien Rance and Zhaochun Wu, built an aplication that can practically query federal health data sets to visually displaying individual and interpersonal relationships. The team, “want[s] people to understand statistical health discrepancies between demographic groups, as well as be able to identify and better understand areas of possible health concern that may affect them.”
3rd place prizes were awarded to PanHealth, HealthShare and HealthZUI. Each team took home $500 and you can learn more about their work from their demo videos.
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