GE Hackathon: To create digital solutions to increase healthcare access

New Delhi : On a mission to take high quality, affordable healthcare technology to the people who need it most, GE Healthcare hosted a 24-hour hackathon on digital health technologies. The hackathon was organized as part of GE HealthHack, an initiative to collaborate with the developer ecosystem for a smarter, healthier India.

Sivan Menon, VP Engineering & CTO GE Healthcare Digital India, stated, "The lack of access to quality clinical care close to a patient's home is a major cause of medical problems being detected late and having poor clinical outcomes. The GE HealthHack is an opportunity for developers to innovate digital solutions for some of India's toughest healthcare challenges, be it lowering maternal and infant deaths, or improving availability of trained medical professionals in rural areas. This initiative reiterates GE's commitment to making quality healthcare accessible and affordable to all."

The first round or idea phase was conducted online via HackerEarth, and saw the participation of over 350 teams. A panel of judges shortlisted 50 teams to participate in the 24-hour hackathon at GE premises in Whitefield, Bangalore on February 11^th&12^th.The top three teams walked away with cash prizes of INR 1 lakh each.

The top three teams, in no particular order, were:

• Team: _Trailblazers_ (Pranav Acharya, Shibin TV, Shailesh S Tayde, Amit Tiwary)

Solution: Flexible Contextual Care, a simplified user experience for doctors/expert users of the Contextual Care protocol, enabling them to access and navigate a decision tree on their mobile in order to treat a patient with ease of accessibility.

• NP_Complete_Ninjas (Sumanth Prabhu, Rajesh Shreedhar Bhat, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder)

Solution: DeepTrack, a video content analysis system for ICU applications that captures faces in a given frame, identifies emotions from facial expressions and tracks motion.

• Deep Learners (Mohana Krishna Chittoor, Abraham Chandy, Emmanuel D'Souza)

Solution:Vision-based Smart Patient Monitoring to address facial recognition, smart people flow monitoring, smart sleep monitoring, smart detection of uneasy movement in the patient and facial emotion detection.

However, the GE HealthHack doesn't end here. The hackathon winners will continue to work closely with experts at GE Healthcare Digital India to further develop their prototypes and present realizable solutions at the final round in April. The grand finale promises not only a cash prize of INR 4 lakh for the winning team, but an opportunity for GE to implementthe solution to improve healthcare access in India.

The GE HealthHack is another step towards GE's vision of looking at healthcare in a completely new way focusing on earlier, pre-symptomatic disease detection and prevention, instead of late diagnosisand helping clinicians access more information and intervene sooner with targeted treatments so their patients can lead longer, fuller lives.