Participate in a Pandemic Response Hackathon This Weekend!

Posted by Hannah Sinemus on March 24th, 2020 Posted in: Health Professionals, Outreach, Public Health, Technology

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Convened by Datavant in collaboration with the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the American Public Health Association, Komodo Health, Prognos, Mapbox, and Immuta, the Pandemic Response Hackathon is a virtual hackathon aimed at better understanding and mitigating the spread of COVID-19 and future pandemics. The goal is to bring public health professionals alongside the technology community’s talent to contribute to the world’s response to the pandemic. Hackathon projects will be formulated and judged by an interdisciplinary panel of public health, health IT, and policy experts. The hackathon will kick off March 27-29, with continued support for developing projects.

Who can participate?

The organizers of the Pandemic Response Hackathon are looking for:

• Builders – technologists such as engineers, back-end and front-end software developers, data scientists; product managers, and UX designers who wish to contribute.
• Public health experts, clinicians, and health care workers, who have project ideas that would be useful, who can serve as subject matter experts providing real world context, and who can provide product, process, and policy feedback.

What types of projects will be included?

Projects will be divided into four tracks. The organizers are seeking submissions for ideas in these four tracks, which will be curated ahead of the event to inspire specific project ideas.

• Public Health Information Sharing. For example, tools for local governments to share information with citizens, tools for information exchange between healthcare professionals, tools for information sharing with patients, etc.
• Epidemiology & Science of the Disease. For example, information sharing tools between researchers investigating the disease; novel use of data sets to understand the rate of spread of the disease; tools to facilitate clinical trial recruitment and operations for COVID-19 studies; etc.
• Keeping our Health Workers Safe. For example, workload coordination tools; information sharing tools with best practices; etc.
• Second-Order Societal Impacts. For example, projects to address mental well-being at nursing homes in light of restricted visitors; ways to help curate public health information and curb disinformation

Visit the Pandemic Response Hackathon website to register for the event, see ideas that have already been submitted, submit your own ideas, and get answers to questions about building your team or joining an existing project.