Healthcare Hackathon 2021
Promoting Wellness Practice For Health Professionals
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Date: Wednesday September 22, 2021
Time: 9:30am – 4:00pm
Location: Zoom (Register for links)
Come join us at this exciting event hosted by Harrell Health Sciences Library at the Penn State College of Medicine in collaboration with the Office of Nursing Research and Innovation. Teams will compete to come up with the best solution related to the theme and then present their idea to an expert panel of judges. The winning team will receive a prize and a featured article in the library’s widely distributed newsletter! This is a great opportunity to build your skills in innovation, collaboration, and leadership. You do not need to have a team already to enter, we can place you with one when you register. This year’s event will be held entirely online for the safety of all involved and to encourage participation from all PSU campuses.
This Year’s Theme: Promoting Wellness Practice For Health Professionals
Themes are intentionally broad and open for interpretation. This year’s theme grew out of reflections on pandemic experience, high rates of stress and burnout among healthcare professionals in all types of roles. Some questions we are hoping to explore with the theme: How can practicing wellness habits be made more intentional, trackable, and consistent? What kind of systems can be built to support healthcare professionals in making those practices part of their routine?
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can participate?
All Penn State employees and students are welcome to attend! Registration is required, and will be capped at 40 participants on a first-come first-serve basis, so sign up early if you’d like to ensure your spot. The event will be completely online, so no travel will be required to attend!
There are many important roles to fill on a hackathon team: business & marketing, design, development, and subject experts. The judging will be on your PowerPoint presentation of the idea and a proof-of-concept prototype that can be interactive or purely visual. In other words, no coding required! Different team members will assist with different parts of the project, and help will be available throughout.
What's a Hackathon?
A hackathon is a “marathon length” project development session that usually has an element of competition and revolves around a particular theme. Hackathons originated in the world of programming, but recently the concept has expanded to include other fields and skill sets.
Example
Let’s say a Hackathon was held with the theme of “Reducing Environmental Impact on our Campus”
Here are what some of the results might look like:
Team #1:
The idea: A badge rewards system to encourage the principles of “reduce, reuse, recycle”
The prototype: A layout of the homepage for the badge tracking site that includes an interaction for adding a badge to your collection. Shows a few sample badge images and describes how they could be earned, how they would be tracked, and other relevant elements of how the actual implementation would work.
The pitch: This solution is intended to provide positive reinforcement for eco-friendly habits.
Team #2:
The idea: An app that sends out notifications at certain times of day to remind you to conserve energy. Users would receive push notifications with reminders such as “Don’t forget to turn off the lights before you leave the house!” or “Reducing the thermostat before bed is a good way to save energy and money!” Each user could customize their options based on their habits, and set the frequency and timing of reminders to their preferences.
The prototype: An example profile of a single user, with times and text content of the messages they would receive in a week.
The pitch: This idea would reduce environmental impact by targeting areas of waste in users’ daily habits.
How do I get buy-in from my supervisor to let me attend this event?
Hackathons are a great skill-building exercise for promoting creative thinking, collaboration, and leadership. This event may also help you generate an idea that could be developed into a commercial enterprise, a research project, or an invention that could bring accolades to your department and our institution as a whole.
What if I would like to join but don't have a group?
No problem! When you register, there will be an option to be placed in a group. Or if you’d prefer you may enter solo.
Tools and Resources
Check out the library’s guide on prototyping with design thinking for ideas on brainstorming tools and processes.
Adobe Creative Cloud includes multiple programs that are useful for prototyping, and it’s available to Penn State faculty, staff, and students.
Visit adobe.psu.edu to find out how to access Creative Cloud products if you are a member of Penn State.
The “What’s Included” page of adobe.psu.edu includes descriptions of each of the tools, plus links to tutorials.
Here we’ll go over a few that may be useful for your projects:
Adobe Spark: A web-based program for creating basic websites, video, and graphics that are shareable by generating links
Adobe Premiere Rush: A basic video-editing program
Adobe XD: Best for creating interactive prototypes for apps on mobile devices
Note: Adobe XD may be unavailable to download on some Penn State/Penn State Health computers
Adobe Illustrator: Create vector graphics that can be scaled without losing their crispness
Keep an eye out for introductory workshops for some of these tools at the Harrell Health Sciences Library!