Hacking Health REshape 2015, an inspiring combination of knowledge & skills

In august 2015 we organized the first Hacking Health event within the Netherlands. In what used to be the children’s intensive care departments 67 developers, designers, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals and patients came together to build on the future of health and care.

We started out on friday afternoon with a pitch clinic. Every attendee that wanted to present their problem or ideas had the opportunity to get a pitch clinic from our speaker coach Sander Datema. He helped them refine their own stories and also learned them how to do a proper ‘elevator pitch’.

It was great to see that most of the pitches were given by patients, patients who called for the help of developers and designers to build solutions that would fit their needs.

After these pitches the stage was taken by several inspiring speakers. These speakers ranged from Jopie Verhoeven chair of the patient advisory board to Philips Nootenboom Head of Digital at Philips Healthcare. They gave the audience a bit more insights into the challenges we face in the coming years but also explained what opportunities they see in health and medicine.

With this pill of inspiration the attendees were asked to form teams around the pitchers, finally 12 teams were ready to go.

During the weekend we saw a lot of positive energy in this amazing group. Developers gaining new insights from the knowledge of healthcare professionals, designers being amazed about the stories of the patients and healthcare professionals and patients seeing the opportunities these ‘techies’ could give them. We still remember the saturday night, after a long day of healthcare hacking we were ready to close the venue to allow our guests to have some sleep. What we found was not only a few fanatic developers that were already deep within their coding, we also found a group of patients and healthcare professionals that were so passionate about their idea that they would use every last second they could get to improve their concepts. A group that had never been to a hackathon before, was not used to working in such a set-up was still going strong and pushing themselves.

Sunday, d-day. All the teams had to present their ideas for the judges. After a exciting round of presentations it was up to the judges to pick the winners. The following teams were the proud winners of Hacking Health REshape 2015:

• First place: Fatigue in chronic patients
  • Anne-Miek Vroom, patient
  • Sivera Berben, researcher
  • William van der Moolen, designer
• Second place: Sugar Crush
  • Thomas Vijn
  • Stijn Vedder
  • Debby Marchena
  • Irene Gielen
  • Peter Krol
  • Michiel Sträter
• Third place: ICD Hack
  • Wilbert Stikkelbroeck
  • Martijn van der Meulen
  • Bram Kievit
  • Elise van Belle
  • Pieter van Laatum
  • Manon Plokker

Our friends from b302 also made a video of this day, you can watch it below:

Also click on the image below to check out the pictures that were taken and edited by Heiko Hartsuijker: