By Lasia Kretzel

Hacking helps health-care woes

Sep 29, 2014 | 7:07 AM

Health-care professionals and tech experts teamed up in Saskatoon this weekend to hack into health system problems.

The University of Saskatchewan hosted the city's first Hacking Healthcare, a competitive event that brings innovators and front-line workers together to solve everyday health-care problems.

“(Health-care professionals) know what the problems are in health care, they see the problems because they're on the frontline every day,” Saskatoon event organizer Adam McInnes said.

“The problem is they don't always know how to actually make those solutions because they don't have those technical skills. So we want to bring in the technical people who have those skills sets… but they don't understand the clinical problems.”

Teams spent the weekend planning, designing, building and pitching their solutions to specific health-care woes.

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“A lot of the stuff we're looking at are bottom up solutions; what are the problems we're seeing on the front lines and how do we address those?” McInnes said. 

Ideas ranged from heated chairs for dialysis patients to programs that train regular dogs to wake post traumatic stress disorder patients from nightmares.

Some of the solutions, however, were to problems that affect any health-care user.

Fourth-year medical student Prasun Das said when he was a new student, one of the most difficult tasks was navigating the hospitals for meetings, patients and classes.

His team worked on designing an interactive 'Google Maps'-like system for hospitals.

“It's a functional model to save students' time, patients' time, family members' time and just to help people navigate the health-care system and college infrastructure,” Das said.

The team faced many challenges such as what platform to present their idea and how to make it cost effective and worthwhile for hospitals to invest their limited finances into.

Hacking Healthcare began in 2012 in Montreal and has since spread to other Canadian cities such as Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and Whitehorse.

The idea was also picked up by groups in Strasbourg, Cape Town, Hong Kong and there's talk of hosting them in New York and other United States cities.

The Saskatoon group hopes to host another event in Regina within a year or two. 

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