our work
HACK HealthCare 2023
Hack Healthcare is the annual event at which innovators from across the healthcare ecosystem solve concrete patient and industry problems, explore new business possibilities, and lay foundations for future collaborations.
I’s an open, public sandbox that stimulates creativity and establishes connections between isolated silos of healthcare.
It delivers fresh insights, novel business models and new digital tools.
WHY
Organisations across the Healthcare industry feel the need to deliver better healthcare outcomes and to relieve pressure on limited resources. In the context of static business models and substantial regulatory burden, a new level of creativity and collaboration is necessary to successfully innovate and to unlock the promise of digital technologies. At Hack Healthcare, companies forge new collaborations to start implementing ideas immediately after the event.
WHAT WE DID
Over 160 people joined the third edition of Hack Healthcare.
The areas of the ecosystem represented by the participants in this edition range from different healthcare sectors (hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, insurance, mutualities, etc.) as well as technology companies, government, patients and patient organisations, entrepreneurs, and other professionals.
During two intense days, Hack Healthcare combined the focus and the positive pressure cooker of a hackathon with the creative sparkle of an ideation workshop. It also built trust and the mutual understanding necessary to forge long-term collaborations and partnerships.
The participants worked together to design innovative and concrete solutions for healthcare challenges. They also counted with the support of experts and pitch coaches to come up with bulletproof projects.
THEMES AND CHALLENGES
For each edition of Hack Healthcare, our partners, our community and experts identify 4 broad themes and 12 concrete challenges to hack at the event.
Before the event, the challenges are validated by the rest of the ecosystem in four online Ecosystem Workshops.
Screening & Prevention
Accelerate targeted screening and increase the effectiveness of prevention activities
CHALLENGES
- Lung Cancer Screening, hosted by MSD How might we identify existing sources of smoking history data for the estimated 15% of Belgians who are smokers or former smokers, aggregate and enrich this data in full respect of patients’ rights, evaluate the need for additional touchpoints for collecting it, and make it actionable for screening purposes by health authorities, as well as to motivate smokers and former smokers to undergo screening?
- Wellness for women entering menopause, hosted by Helan: How might we bundle existing and new knowledge and services to deliver a holistic personalised, scientifically sound wellness program for women entering menopause, deliver it through a single platform, monitor its effectiveness, and ensure its financial sustainability?
Enhancing Patient Experience
Empower patients for greater autonomy through better knowledge and enhanced remote care
CHALLENGES
- Onboarding for endocrine therapy, hosted by Roche: How might we design and roll out a personalised onboarding process for endocrine therapy that would help women fully understand the benefits and the side effects of the treatment, assess their physical and mental readiness, and – with support of the healthcare practitioners – take the necessary steps to prepare for and successfully start endocrine therapy?
- New, complementary, sources of support for advanced breast cancer patients, hosted by Novartis: How might we create a single point of contact for patients and onco-nurses that can streamline access to a comprehensive overview of different kinds of support for advanced breast cancer patients, personalized to each patient’s journey, stage of treatment, level of understanding and education, and functioning as an orchestrator of support to ensure patients do not lose time and feel empowered when seeking information or support?
- Caring for partners of advanced breast cancer patients, hosted by Novartis: How might we create a single, comprehensive and personalised source of information for partners (60-75 y.o.) of advanced breast cancer patients to empower them to access simplified, clear explanations about the disease, treatment, and other aspects, as well as to offer a holistic overview of available tools and resources from the beginning and throughout the caregiving process so they can effectively support their loved ones while maintaining their own well-being and quality of life?
Secondary Use of Healthcare Data
Improve access to clinical and non-clinical healthcare data for research, policy, and other purposes
CHALLENGES
- Catalog of Healthcare Data, hosted by the Belgian Health Data Agency How might we help data-hungry patients get an overview of all sources of their own health data by creating a structured national health data catalog, that could also be used as the first step towards the European Health Data Space?
- Clear Value of Data, hosted by the European Association for the Study of Obesity: How might we leverage hospital electronic medical records to effectively document the data gathered for each individual obesity patient, help them understand how to use the data to guide, or to better follow, their own journey, and to trigger them to share their data for the benefit of others?
- Understanding value-based health outcomes, hosted by Esperity: How might we put in place a scalable process for capturing quality of life data across multiple therapeutic areas, link them to clinical outcomes, and provide policymakers with a more comprehensive picture of effectiveness of new technology, interventions, or medicines, while creating value for other stakeholders, starting with the patient?
- Growing capacity for ophthalmological treatments, hosted by Roche: How might we assemble a realistic picture of current and future demand for ophthalmological treatments, maximise current capacity, and start growing the treatment capacity to meet future demand?
Humanising hospital operations
Give doctors and nurses back the time to work with the patients – as well as to optimise patient experience – by outsourcing administrative and other repetitive tasks to AI and ML tools
CHALLENGES
- Connecting first and second lines of care, hosted by InterSystems: How might we enable home care organisations’ Electronic Healthcare Record systems to exchange a broad range of data (status updates, care requests, test results, etc.) with hospital and general practitioners’ Electronic Healthcare Record systems in both directions?
- Capturing and Using Patient Evaluations, hosted by InterSystems: How might we systematically capture patient evaluations of treatments and treatment results, link these evaluations to treatment data recorded by hospitals, and leverage the combined results for improving quality of care?
- Reviewing the data collection process, hosted by Clinique St.Jean & Cliniques de l’Europe: How might we review the data collection, sharing, and output processes to better adapt them to the nurses’ workflows, to minimize nurses’ time lost to data entry and verification, and ensure high-quality, correctly structured data?
RESULTS
During Hack Healthcare 2022, 17 teams were formed and 9 of them pursued their project idea further with the support of the challenge hosts and the event partners. In addition to the immediate results, the event saw a seamless, successful, collaboration between companies and people from all across the healthcare ecosystem – including between companies that usually are in direct competition with each other.
Experts
The humans behind Hack Healthcare.
