For Release
August 28, 2015
The Cleveland Medical Hackathon, presented by Nesco Resource, is partnering with the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Ingenuity Cleveland to present a Community Health & Wellness track during the event. Working with the CWRU School of Medicine Urban Health Initiative and Ingenuity Cleveland, this track will focus on leveraging data to understand and improve health at the population level. This means, for example, being able to understand how hard or easy it is to buy healthy food in various neighborhoods, or to see what parts of the city need resources so that people can safely engage in physical activity. The Community Health & Wellness track will join three other tracks including patient activation, safety, and identity management.
The Urban Health Initiative, part of the CWRU Clinical and Translational Science Collaborative, operates the Cleveland & Cuyahoga Health Resource (healthdatamatters.org) to provide access to data relevant to community health. These and other data will be available for the Community Health & Wellness Track. This partnership grows from a collaboration with Ingenuity Cleveland’s Health Hack Cleveland initiative, as part of Ingenuity’s emerging hackathon series uniting Cleveland’s creative landscape with business, entrepreneurship, and civic opportunities through a growing year-round schedule of lectures, events and other programming (ingenuitycleveland.org).
“More and more, people use technology to manage their health, track their exercise and food intake, and to engage social support networks,” said Amy Sheon, Executive Director of Urban Health Initiative Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “This generates data that can be used to understand large scale trends and needs in health and wellness. The challenge to the hackathon participants focused on this track will be: How can we use data from public and non-public sources to reveal trends in population health, to identify the best opportunities for promoting health and wellness, and to enable people to live long, healthy lives?”
The overall goal of the Cleveland Medical Hackathon is to create technological solutions that utilize the large amounts of information being collected related to health and medical issues. Today, the ability to collect information sometimes outpaces our ability to make sense of it and actually improve the health of individuals and large populations. The Cleveland Medical Hackathon will gather clinicians, technologists, researchers and members of the community to form teams and solve these issues. More information on sponsoring or participating in the event can be found here: www.clevelandmedicalhackathon.com.
Using this basic framework, participants in the Hackathon can come to the event with a basic kernel of an idea, pose a challenge, or present a technology. Teams can form at the event around these ideas and move ahead with creating solutions.
After approximately 24 hours, teams will be asked to present their solutions to a panel of judges. Projects will be evaluated not only on creativity and execution, but how well the project met the goals of this hackathon: how technology and innovation can help us achieve better healthcare outcomes for all people.
Other lead partners of the Cleveland Medical Hackathon include Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, The MetroHealth System, BioEnterprise and Flashstarts. The Cleveland Medical Hackathon is presented by Nesco Resource, which has created the Nesco Innovation Award for the event. Nesco Resource is one