Winners: Boston Big Data Code-A-Thon @athenahealth

Boston was a beautiful 80 degreess today, but inside athenahealth’s headquarters, developers kept their heads cool while the competition heated up. Health 2.0′s Boston Code-a-thon is a coding competition designed around using big data to build exciting new applications and tools to improve health care. Health 2.0 partnered with athenahealth, AT&T, and MIT’s H@cking Medicine to throw the event. Developers had access to AT&T’s mHealth API, as well as athenahealth’s API and data. You’ll find a slideshow of the event and a list of the great ideas and big winners below.

1st - $4,000

And an invite to Health 2.0′s Spring Fling: Matchpoint Boston and athenahealth’s More Disruption Please conference.

No Sleep Kills: Poor sleep health from conditions like sleep apnea leads to increased risk of car crashes and other dangerous accidents. Almost two million drivers crash because of fatigue each year. The No Sleep Kills app creates a portal where patients/professionals can review and access data regarding sleep risks by state and compare to national averages. The application uses big data to compare sleep-related car crashes with rates of sleep apnea and related conditions like obesity. The team’s next step is to compare sleep-related accident data with sleep apnea testing expenditures on a state by state basis. No Sleep Kills showed us an application of big data to a little publicized issue that is actually a serious problem.

2nd Place - $3000

MyBetterFit: This team mined nearly one million user profiles charting effectiveness and side effects to various drugs. As a next step, they aggregated the data by user and condition, then compared effectiveness of common treatments for the users who had taken at least two drugs. There were over 100,000 such users in the case of depression, with an average of nine treatments tried per user. Treatments also included activities like journaling, exercise and therapy in addition to conventional anti-depressants. As a starting point, today MyBetterFit has discovered a number of interesting correlations regarding which drugs will be effective for a user given his or her previous reactions to other treatments.

 

3rd place - $1000

Brain Safe: Using normalized, age specific brainwave data from the NIH, the Brain Safe platform identifies abnormally high Beta brain waves in tested users. Incorporating a Mindwave Mobile headset to measure brain waves and an Orbotix Sphero to provide instant feedback, their interface provides an immediate way to measure potential braininjury. This platform can track and identify sports players who may have had a concussive event.

Runners Up - $500

Team Data-Driven: The “Decisions for Diminutive Descendants” tool helps families find healthy areas to live based on a series of health factors that they can rank by importance. For the prototype, Team Data-Driven focused on enabling people to compare a series of addresses. Their data source for the prototype was the 2012 County Health Rankings dataset, but many additional data sets could be integrated as well.

I’m Sick: ”I’m Sick” allows you to navigate through your social network to identify who has been sick and how long their disease lasted. This informs your decision on whether you need to seek treatment. The peer-to-peer epidemiological tool allows you to track sickness as it pertains to you.

Aavya Health: This team designed a web application that enables patients to understand their lab results in a visually attractive, intuitive manner. The application also provides concrete insights how these results affect patients’ risk of disease and how these risks can be modified by behavior change.

StayDays: StayDays is a mobile application, implemented on the Google Android platform today, that displays the probable length of stay, in days, for a hospitalization based on the diagnosis/reason for the hospitalization.