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March 28, 2018

Hackathoners collaborate on a solution to the case study. Left to right: Carolina Ferguson, Regional Manager – System and Report Standardization; Riley Cann, Jr. DS Advisor; Paige Norris, DS Advisor; Selina Tang, Co-op student; Riho Nakamoto, Co-op student; Annie Chan, DS Advisor.

Decision Support holds its first ever hackathon and creates a stir

6 teams

31 participants

3 hours

5 judges

1 case

Hackathons are events in which experts collaborate intensively on tackling a problem. Charged and inspired to innovate, Decision Support staff enlisted teams and were pushed to think outside the box.

Teams had three hours to solve a problem: meaningfully describe and characterize VCH’s home health clients. Understanding clients better enables us to make targeted decisions around differentiated care. Home health is a subset of VCH Community health services that provides service to over 44,000 clients every year, most of whom are seniors.

Decision Support Health Systems Planning Advisor, Deepak Kumaraswamy, conceptualizes chronic disease rates.

A variety of measures are collected to monitor service activity, operational quality, and efficiency. However, understanding these clients at a population level is a more difficult task. Complicating factors include the consistency, availability, and integration of data across different source systems, making it difficult to fully understand our clients’ journey in our health system.

With roaming consultants, participants had to understand the data’s caveats and pitch a solution to the panel of judges. Judges included community leader Andrew Day, Director for Vancouver Central and Program Lead for Primary Care, who remarked how powerful the energy was on the floor whilst hackathoners worked away.

Staying dedicated to our VCH True North goal of providing the best care, the Hackathon aimed to address how to improve health outcomes and reduce health inequities.

Interested in how hackathons could benefit your team?

Looking ahead, Decision Support would like to hear from programs across the organization to better understand their challenges, and see what data-driven insight we could offer in future hackathons.

If you are interested in discussing what a hackathon could do for your team, please contact Nuzhat Jamal, Special Projects Lead with Decision Support.

Judges evaluate a Hackathon group pitching their solution. Left to right: Andrew Day, Director, Vancouver Central and Program Lead for Primary Care, Vancouver Community; Suhail Nanji, Regional Lead, Mental Health & Substance Use, Regional Programs and Service Integration; Jat Sandhu, Executive Director, Data Analytics and Decision Support. Foreground: Michael Li, Director, System Improvement, Decision Support; Deep Sandhu, Data Analytics Business Manager, Decision Support.