Health Hackathon at the University of Auckland

I forgot when and from whom I heard it, but the phrase has been etched in my memory: "If there had been no such thing as deadline, the human would have not accomplished anything." More famously, the importance of an encounter in limited timeframe is stressed in the spirit of traditional Japanese tea ceremony as "Every meeting is just one occasion in the lifetime."

Today I attended just a small portion of the Health Hackathon: Solving Self-Care event being held at Tamaki Campus, the University of Auckland from Frinday to Sunday this weekend. I think it is a showpiece of what people can achieve if they concentrate their efforts in well-defined scope and timeframe.

I joined the team named "Hunger Reminder" which was working in the following proposition: Giving people the ability to recognise and be aware of hunger signs and support them in their ability to make better eating decisions. The primary target of this approach is to support people with Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBDs) to better manage their condition. It has potential to extend also to managing Diabetes, Obesity, Other inflammatory conditions, Eating disorders (such as Anorexia)

Our discussions utilise a variety of online free tools like Canvanizer Business Model Brainstorming tool, Draw.io Cloud Diagram Drawing tool and Concept.ly Application Prototyping tool. These tools greatly helped us share thoughts and formulate and visualise our ideas in tackling and solving the problems we were taking on.

Then what if similar tools are provided and available for healthcare namely self-care settings? As healthcare is about identifying and solving problems, actually we are want for health-focused equivalents of those tools. Then the age-old question, again. Why health IT cannot do what IT is doing for another industries or businesses?

However, so far in Health Hackathon, at least we are succeeding in rapid cycle prototyping in health IT. The question is how we keep and build our momentum. Maybe we should do this kind of event regularly to cultivate and disseminate the lessons we are learning.

HL7 January 2015 WGM San Antonio

It is a bit funny that it was my very first time to attend a HL7 conference or meeting held in the USA in my almost seventeen years career as a health IT specialist, throughout which I had been involved in the international health IT standardisation organisation via its affiliates in Japan and in New Zealand.

Previously, I had attended two International HL7 Interoperability Conferences (IHICs) in Acapulco, Mexico (2004) and in Auckland, New Zealand (2007). Even talking about Working Group Meetings (WGMs), I had attended those in Kyoto, Japan (2009) and in Sydney, Australia (2011). So I was not one of new faces at all, rather an old head with more than a decade of attendance records.

I think this shows the crucial importance of holding HL7 meetings and conferences outside of the USA regularly. The HL7 New Zealand (HL7 NZ) has a policy of sending one delegate to each WGM. Thus this time I was a proxy to the HL7 NZ Chair, David Hay, but in the occasion like the one in Sydney, we could send all the board members to the event. Such opportunities would help both the HL7 International and the affiliates in and around hosting countries share problems and exchange ideas for potential solutions.

My tweets and others' with the hashtag #HL7WGM pretty much covered the discussions happened in the WGM and you can dig in the wiki pages of Working Groups for further details so I would not repeat them here. I would like to conclude by introducing a music clip (although without no connections to the event except I knew about the band/tune in the return flight) which I think would summarise the meeting well. Enjoy!