Hacking Health: UC Berkeley’s First Health IT Innovation Workshop

In the wake of Health 2.0, UC Berkeley held its first hackathon focused entirely on health information technology. Supported by the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Morgenthaler Ventures, I had the honor of launching Hacking Health with Liz Rockett, Cal MBA/MPH alum and Director at Imprint Capital Advisors, as well as Emily Barabas, a health information guru studying at the Cal School of Information. Frustrated with academic silos and inundated by conferences, we wanted to bring an event to our classmates where we actually built something.

But we had no idea when we started that so many diverse experts from the community would join us, nor that the event would be held at Skydeck. Formerly owned by Intel, Skydeck is now jointly managed by the Haas Business School’s Lester Center and the Cal College of Engineering’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. The view was breathtaking, with 360 degree views up into the green Berkeley hills and out to silhouettes of the Transamerica Pyramid and Golden Gate Bridge. Still, the view was mere icing; the real meal was a new venue for minds to meet and help heal our healthcare system.

Sixty people gathered on Friday afternoon to hear talks by an illustrious trio of healthcare veterans. Lisa Suennen, Managing Partner of Psilos Partners laid out the good, bad and ugly of HIT business models. Addressing each interconnected node of the healthcare system, her message was refreshing, advocating for health IT entrepreneurs to understand reimbursement flow and solve real economic problems. Interestingly, her skepticism of ad-based revenue models was followed by the story of Practice Fusion’s start by Matt Douglass, VP Engineering. Matt shared how the EMR’s go-to-market strategy successfully used subsidies from across the healthcare ecosystem to lower barriers to innovation in the doctor’s office. He also related the company’s challenging beginnings and the probability that Practice Fusion would not be the world’s most widely-used EMR without the HITECH Act incentives. Though the two speakers seemed to contradict each other on the surface, both talks underscored the need for health IT innovators to cultivate deep understanding of the healthcare system and relentless focus on the customer. Susan Dybbs from Cooper Design then laid out best practices for user-centric design in healthcare, an industry where usability in every aspect of the system has taken a back seat for decades.

Duly inspired, the Hacking Health attendees got some quick words of wisdom on how to make the most of hackathons from Alex Tam of Frog, then grabbed hors d’ oeuvres and got busy. We wondered what would result from this mix of developers, designers, marketers, clinicians and scientists from UC Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford and California College of the Arts, not to mention industry experts from Google, CalHIPSO, Pivotal Labs, and startups from across Silicon Valley. Our answer: a lot of good ideas, and the intellectual horsepower to make them reality.

At 6 PM the next day, twelve teams were ready to share their innovations. Matt and Susan arrived to judge the final pitches, joined by Missy Krasner of Google Health fame, Enrique Allen, founder of 500 Startups, and Eric Page, veteran healthcare entrepreneur. The pitches were incredibly diverse, each envisioning novel, actionable solutions to some of healthcare’s biggest challenges around information. Just a few of the apps presented were:

Add It – an integrated hospital capital equipment management solution
Care Anywhere – a concierge medical tourism service
Crohnology.com – a Crohn’s disease online community from Rock Health’s Sean Ahrens
Health Hotspot – geospatial visualization using Healthdata.gov
Meduele – a cloud-based automated telephony follow-up application for community clinics
Smooth Transitions –redesigned communication tools for advance directives

Even with the impressive cohort of ideas, several applications rose to the top, based on how much had been accomplished in a day, healthcare system impact, product viability and business model sustainability. The $1000 Best Mobile App prize from Morgenthaler Ventures went to Golden Ear, a game-based therapeutic mobile app aimed at the 40 million Americans suffering from Tinnitus, a persistent high-pitched ringing in the ears. Chung-Hay Luk, a Cal neuroscience PhD, galvanized a team of developers to craft a minimum viable product in a single day that emits tones training the brain to alleviate the condition. Supported by recent literature, this clever app might one day give new options to people who today choose between aggressive pharmaceutical treatment and living in pain.

The $2000 grand prize went to Future Me, a diverse team led by Elise Singer, Cal MBA alum, practicing MD and Chief Medical Officer of CalHIPSO. Elise recruited MBAs, designers and developers to mine Practice Fusion research data in order to give patients a personalized forecast of how partnering on better clinical and behavioral choices could lower their risk for chronic disease (not to mention health system costs). Consumer-directed educational quizzes about the health impact of common retail brands enabled product placement to drive revenue, and showed that the team had clearly considered the commercial sustainability of their application.

The fact that I saw indiGO, an almost identical – albeit more polished – app presented at Health 2.0 by the Archimedes team (which probably worked on their app for more than a day), only supported the judges’ decision in my mind. While posing with her winning team, Elise’s impassioned call for personal data transparency as a key ingredient to a healthier America was a sentiment shared by all who spent their Saturday hacking healthcare.

Indeed, data transparency is critical if we are to build a better system. But even full data accessibility is alone insufficient for information to transform healthcare. Real insight around clinical outcomes, cost effectiveness, genetic determinants of disease, and a thousand other questions is only possible if we reach beyond our silos to integrate code, design, business, medicine and policy to create information solutions that work in the real world. Only together can we tackle the convoluted web of unintended consequences that US care delivery has become, and engineer 21^st century health.

Stuart Kamin

MBA/MPH Candidate 2012
Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley