THE EDGE IS HERE
Health hackathon a community effort
UVic kickstarts a new collaboration to tackle complex health issues—powered by local and global partnerships, and the UVic Edge. The hackathon: a new, inclusive approach to problem-solving.
When brilliant minds come together, tough problems get solved. Just ask Island Health, which now has a new way to address an issue affecting hundreds of vulnerable Vancouver Island residents after a team led by international business students in the Sardul S. Gill Graduate School at UVic’s Gustavson School of Business cracked the case. Collaboration was a key element at the first Victoria Health Hackathon this fall. UVic biomedical engineer Stephanie Willerth organized the event to bring together diverse people with wide-ranging experiences and expertise for 24 hours tackling one of five healthrelated problems. Teams picked the problem of their choice and were given three weeks to mull it over, followed by an intense weekend of trying to find a “hack” to solve the problem. Team Vivek—named after team member Vivek Pissay, a UVic MBA student—settled on a particularly sensitive challenge: to identify a better method for notifying on-call forensic nurses when cases of sexual assault, abuse or domestic violence presented at any of 11 hospital emergency wards on Vancouver Island.
Co-ordinating timely, compassionate treatment for sexual assault
Island Health’s Forensic Nurse Examiner Program (FNEP) responds to more than 300 calls every year. But it still relies on pagers to call in a nurse from the 30-member FNEP team to the emergency room. Missing a page is a common problem, especially for nurses in more remote parts of the Island. With no mechanism for escalating paging to a second level of respondents, calls were being missed. Frustrated patients fed up with waiting were leaving the hospital before they’d been seen by a forensic nurse. Opportunities were being lost to gather physical evidence for possible criminal charges against assaulters and to connect assault survivors with legal services.
Team Vivek went to work on the challenge. “We looked into how IT systems manage these kinds of problems,” explains Pissay, “and found a platform that we were able to customize for health-care use. It had to meet all concerns around health-care privacy, cost point, ability to escalate calls, and user friendliness. It had to be simple enough that you don’t have to be techsavvy to use it.”
The hackathon judges awarded Team Vivek the top prize. Better yet, Island Health was so pleased with the proposed solution that it plans on implementing the customized system early in 2019—and has already begun training staff. bit.ly/18-hackathon