Intel-GE Care Innovations™ Hackathon Focuses On Patient Behavior Change and Connecting Care Continuum to Home

Intel-GE Care Innovations™, a pioneer in connecting the care continuum to the home, in partnership with MIT Hacking Medicine, StartX, and Stanford Medical School hosted its first ever hackathon on the campus of Stanford University September 19-21. The event looked to create more effective and meaningful connections between patients, clinicians, and the data collected outside the walls of the clinical setting.

The winning team at the CI Patient Engagement Hackfest: Team 364. Front left to right: Simal Ozen Irmak, Defne Civelekoglu. Back left to right: Nadeem Haidary, Margaret Hagan, Kursat Ozenc, Stephen Han (Photo: Business Wire)

The weekend kicked off with an opening address from ONC’s Deputy National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, Dr. Jacob Reider, who highlighted the importance of personalizing health IT to empower patients to want to take control of their health, which in turn allows physicians to provide better, more specialized care.

“With technology we can move things away from the people who have letters after their name into the home and show patients how they can do it themselves,” Reider said. “If I could log into my iPhone and see the activity of my parents’ daily living and noticed that something had changed, I would know if I needed to do something. Helping patients understand the information in the world could allow them to make better decisions for themselves and their family.”

Over the course of 48 hours, nine teams, comprised of computer programmers, developers, engineers, designers, clinicians, scientists, nurses, family caregivers, patients, and entrepreneurs, worked to develop and design innovative solutions to close the gap between patient consumers and their providers outside the walls of the hospital and establishing connections that create lasting behavioral change and more informed clinical care.

“The missing link in patient engagement is how to motivate people to make different choices in the first place,” said Sean Slovenski, CEO of Care Innovations. “Bringing people together from various industries and backgrounds to tackle some of healthcare’s biggest issues while focusing on the patient consumer is the only way we can create a more effective system. The more we can understand the end human being and get in their head, the more likely we can develop something they will actually use.”

At the end of the hackathon, a panel of judges chose four winning teams, with the top prize going to Team 364 whose mission is to advance the quality of care by facilitating meaningful, year-round interaction. It’s accomplished by combining use-specific kits comprising of sensors that bridge patient engagement and medical provider insight. Other winning teams focused on innovations in medication adherence, instant emotional support for cancer patients via mobile phones on a local level and real-time connections between medications taken and reactions.

All teams were awarded prizes, including face-to-face consultations with Care Innovations executives. The goal of these consultations is to help further develop the teams’ innovative ideas, concepts, and solutions for revolutionizing patient engagement and for obtaining consistent, reliable health and behavioral data from the home, which is currently lacking throughout the care delivery process.

Dr. Lyle Berkowitz, Associate Chief Medical Officer of Innovation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, delivered the closing remarks, encouraging participants to continue developing ideas beyond the event and the value in innovative solutions that can make a difference in an industry plagued by inefficiencies.

“Hackathons like these are the type of opportunities we only have a few times in our lives,” said Berkowitz. “Take advantage of what happens at places like this that brings you together with passionate and inspiring people and be prepared to go forward with innovations that focus on making the patient the most important part of the care team.”

The CI Patient Engagement Hackfest sparked disruptive, tangible ideas that will serve as building blocks to help MIT Hacking Medicine, StartX, and Care Innovations advance care, strengthen the connection between providers, payers, caregivers, and consumers, and bring the care continuum to the home.

About Intel-GE Care Innovations™

Intel-GE Care Innovations™, a joint venture between Intel Corporation and GE Healthcare, connects the care continuum to the home and makes it easier for patients, family caregivers, and professional caregivers to interact and achieve better health at home.

Experts in technology and behavior change, Care Innovations identifies the best methods for health care providers and health plans to capture and integrate real-time data from the home into care delivery. The company’s third-generation remote care management solution, Connect RCM, delivers insights for timely intervention and superior patient engagement with patients outside the formal care setting. The Connect RCM application is built with a smart filter and predictive analytics platform that sorts the complex array of aggregated data captured from a wide array of sensors and sources present in the daily lives of consumers. Visit www.careinnovations.com to learn more.

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