Health Hack Archives - Day One

“To have people solve a real need for women with Parkinson’s Disease was a unique experience”

sina — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 10:48:59 +0000

Richelle Flanagan from Ireland and her team won the DayOne Health Hack 2021 with their project My Moves Matter. Their idea: to track the fluctuation of Parkinson’s Disease symptoms during the menstrual cycle with the help of technology.

Richelle, your project was chosen to win the DayOne Health Hack 2021. Congratulations! Tell us how you heard about the Hackathon.

The Women’s Brain Project contacted me and asked me to consider becoming a patient champion for the Health Hack. I then engaged with Steven Bourke, the patient champion liaison on behalf of EUPATI CH, who explained what the Health Hack was all about. I thought it was an exciting opportunity to see how technology could help people with Parkinson’s. As a person living with Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease (YOPD) and a health professional, I see the immense potential of technology to improve the lives of people living with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Research shows that the pandemic has had a negative impact on symptoms and disease progression.

Which problem do you want to solve?

I wish to see an application for women with Parkinson’s that can track their symptom fluctuations in relation to their menstrual cycle, enabling clinicians to tailor their treatment and women to better self-manage their symptoms to improve their quality of life and potentially slow progression.

Why do you think this topic is important?

Depending on where you live in the world 40 to 50% of people living with Parkinson’s are women. Based on recent estimated figures of 10 million people living with PD worldwide, that means approximately 5 million women are living with PD. It is estimated 20% are under 60 years of age, that’s 1 million women worldwide, many of whom are still menstruating up to the average age of 51.

As a PD advocate who has suffered from fluctuations of my Parkinson’s symptoms around my menstrual cycle and perimenopause, I believe these fluctuations could be managed better by our health care teams. As women with PD, we need a way to show our clinicians when our symptoms are fluctuating such that they can try different treatments to help even out some of these PD fluctuations. I firmly believe the knowledge and support provided by My Moves Matter can make an enormous difference to the women with YOPD enabling them to keep working, looking after kids or older parents, and managing the household.

Can you tell us a bit more about your motivation for your winning idea?

I had to provide a problem that could be used to define a project for the two-week hackathon. I felt passionate about the potential for technology to improve remote monitoring symptom fluctuation in Parkinson’s. I suggested several technological functions that could benefit Parkinson’s, such as video platforms, remote sensor detection, and voice recognition, with a focus on the tracking of symptom fluctuations to enable more tailored treatments. When we got to the hackathon, we needed to focus on a specific area to deliver a solution in just two weeks. I suggested that we focus on monitoring Parkinson’s Disease fluctuations in women living with YOPD and the effect of their menstrual cycle. The motivation for this idea has been in the making for the past year since I developed a survey asking women with Parkinson’s Disease whether their symptoms fluctuated around their menstrual cycle. 74% of the women reported that their PD symptoms worsened in the week before their menstrual bleed, with 50% saying that their symptoms worsened during their cycle. I moderated two webinars highlighting the needs of women with PD around their hormonal cycles from these results. In addition, I have been a co-author on a paper entitled “Unmet Needs of Women Living with Parkinson’s Disease: Gaps and Controversies” for the journal Movement Disorders. We highlight the need for digital technology to help women with PD. I suggested we name the project My Moves Matter because the needs of women with YOPD are currently underserved.

What was your major takeaway from the two weeks hackathon?

My key takeaway from the two weeks was that mountains can move when people have no agenda other than to develop a solution to a need they feel passionate about.

Why did you win the Hackathon?

We won the hackathon because I asked the team to narrow the focus of the My Moves Matter project specifically around women with PD in relation to their menstrual cycle. We would not have won if people did not believe in this need and passionately roll in behind the solution. Besides the team having different skills to bring to the project, we also looked outside by having Parkinson’s Disease clinicians and women with PD focus groups and outside technical advice for a reality check on what we were trying to deliver. This enabled us to deliver a realistic and achievable prototype in two weeks. This concept is also the first of its kind in the health market that is currently underserved with further potential to expand the concept to other neurological conditions where women’s hormones affect their symptom fluctuations.

Where were your challenges and pitfalls in pursuing your idea?

It would be difficult to do this project on my own without outside expertise and expense. Also, sometimes one can get caught up in the medical side of the problem within our own community when in fact what you need is to come out of your echo chamber and allow people with new perspectives to help make it a reality.

What advantage did the Health Hack offer you in overcoming those pitfalls?

The Health Hack helped to overcome these problems by taking my suggested problem and bringing it to life. To have access to people with different skill sets with no agenda coming together to solve a real need for women with Parkinson’s Disease across different time zones was a unique and motivating experience for me personally. The team’s passion for listening to the problem and their willingness and motivation to find a solution enabled me to approach and engage the women with PD and the clinicians to participate in the focus groups.

What are your plans for your project?

The next steps for My Moves Matter are to set up a core team to meet our next milestone which is to develop a working prototype to evaluate with 200 women with YOPD in the first half of 2022. The ultimate aim is to present a workable app at World Parkinson Congress Barcelona in 2023.

What is your advice for participants of the next Health Hack?

Be open-minded and think blue sky about the health problem you wish to see solved for your community. Be open and available to questions from your team members. Then focus on a specific need for which a realistic starting solution can be developed during the hackathon from which you can build upon afterward. Use the iterative process, engage with platform tools and set up conversations and meetings. I would recommend that champions get stuck in as part of the Health Hack team to enable the solution to be derived from having the person with the condition at the core of the team.

What are you doing when you don’t participate in the Health Hack?

I am married and a mum of two children, a dog, and a cat, which keeps me on my toes. I work as a registered dietitian providing nutrition consultancy. Since my diagnosis, I have had two key areas of focus – raising awareness of the importance of good nutrition in managing Parkinson’s Disease and the need for a greater understanding of the impact of a woman’s hormonal lifecycle on their PD symptoms and progression and the need for personalized treatment. I am a Parkinson’s Disease ambassador for the World Parkinson Congress (WPC), a founding member of the PD Avengers, and the co-founder of the Women’s Parkinson’s project. I am also an advocate for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as it affects our family. I started sea swimming with my Dopamine Dunk fundraiser in May 2021, where I jumped in the sea every day to raise 16K to send people with YOPD disease from around the world to WPC Barcelona 2023. I have swum in the sea every week since and it has been a huge revelation to feel the impact on my brain and my wellbeing.

Get in touch with Richelle Flanagan through LinkedIn or Twitter.

Discover Richelle’s top ten tips on living with Young Onset Parkinsons Disease.

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DayOne Health Hack: pioneering patient centric innovation

sina — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 09:05:12 +0000

This was the DayOne Health Hack 2020

9 patient champions together with 11 Ecosystem Partners identified 14 healthcare challenges which were worked on by 75 developers and experts resulting in 15 hands-on projects, ready to be taken to a next level. This was the DayOne Health Hack 2020. Its first edition exemplified that patient-centric innovation can be more than just lip service, it’s about time to walk the talk — DayOne will continue to do so in 2021!

Mostly a nice-sounding word or a mere concept, the initiators of the DayOne Health Hack together with the commitment of 11 ecosystem partners were poised to continue delivering patient-centricity by making it happen. Early 2020 the DayOne Health Hack started with quite a bold ambition. The aim was to build a world-wide reference platform for exploring the design of patient-driven healthcare solutions. Of course, a long shot would be needed to achieve this goal. Still, in its first edition, the DayOne health hack was able to deliver on its promise: The unique process produced tangible outcomes: 15 hands-on projects of remarkable potential.

The DayOne Health Hack process

The ideation and curation of patient challenges:

12 persons who are patients responded to a first reach out. Of these, 11 accepted an in-depth interview about their patient experience. The synopsis of these interviews led to the identification of four common thematic areas:

Awareness and literacy
Data interoperability
Sharing with the patient community
Measuring causal factors.

During the patient-centric workshop, over 35 healthcare experts, recruited by the 11 consortium partners, worked on these thematic areas together with the patients. After 8 hours and a total of 13 different co-creation sessions, 98 idea cards were formulated. This input was then distilled and curated to 14 patient challenges, each one of them related to one or more patient champions.

Participation and Hackathon:

A first kick-off event engaging with Tech Companies and Talents as well as healthcare experts took place in late April. It attracted over 200 registrants. 140 participants engaged in various deep-dive sessions on patient centricity.

This engagement would then be taken to next level in the Fall with the invitation to a two-week online hackathon format working on the 14 challenges that were identified by the patients in collaboration with the consortium partners.

Over 250 people registered for the online hackathon, counting an average of 150 active members per week and 90 a day contributing to the challenges. Finally, 75 people distributed themselves in 15 different teams engaging with the 9 patients to ideate solutions related to their challenges. All 15 projects crossed the finish line, showcasing first prototypes.

The projects:

6 of the 15 projects were rewarded in three categories (participants, patient champions, ecosystem partner) and received the opportunity to participate at the open innovation session of the DayOne Conference. This allowed them to further shape their solutions, get in touch with potential supporters from the industry and finally turn their projects into possible healthcare ventures. In addition, all 15 projects were invited to apply for the DayOne Accelerator. 6 out of 15 did so and one project was selected to participate. As of early 2021, all projects are still active and some have been invited to pitch their solutions to one or several consortium partners. Take a look at the great projects that were developed during the health hack here.

Thank you to the Health Hack partners. Looking forward to the Health Hack 2021!

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5th Edition, DayOne Conference (2020) Shaping the ecosystem for the future of health

sina — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 10:57:19 +0000

Shaping the ecosystem for the future of health

In its 5th edition, the DayOne Conference set new records: 850 participants attended via an event platform. 90 project champions applied for one of the 30 spots at the Open Innovation session co-creating their venture journey together with over 200 experts. This success was possible thanks to the support of main sponsor Arcondis, to Innosuisse and to the collaboration with the BioData World Congress.

Once again the DayOne Conference brought different perspectives of healthcare innovation together. The program started with the patient champions from the DayOne Health Hack. Backed by a strong consortium from the healthcare ecosystem, the participants of the DayOne Health Hack produced 15 hands-on solutions to real world challenges that were curated together with nine patient champions.

The bright ideas session delivered insights to some of the most pending questions for the future of health: How to build a health data ecosystem? How to make value-based healthcare happen? How to bring and validate new digital solutions faster? How to implement smart prevention measures like personalized nutrition?

Thomas Szucs, Professor at the University of Basel and President of the board with Helsana, stated the clear need for change while keeping an eye on what is really needed and feasible – in his words on “true innovation”. This statement was picked up in Session 2 when entrepreneurs gave their insights on the success factors for digital health ventures: Mostly, it is not about having a great idea, it is about creating value for patients.

Manuel Kammermann, Arcondis: “The DayOne Health Hack and the Conference demonstrated how much appetite and need there is to create digital healthcare solutions. It’s now up to us – the healthcare ecosystem, their advisors and implementers – to catch the ball tossed to us and jointly score the next point.”

And these were our take-aways from this years’ conference:

1) Patient centricity is a low-hanging fruit

Most of the stories from the patient champions driving the challenges of the DayOne Health Hack made it clear that it’s not about fancy technology, but about basics like dealing with information overload, not having a clear understanding of what happens next and being left alone with a diagnosis described to them in a language they do not understand. In a nutshell, there are still enough low-hanging fruits to be picked for healthcare innovators wanting to improve the experience of people being patients.

2) The bottleneck is the business

The question is: who benefits from improving the patient experience – other than the patients? This question persists for most of the big healthcare innovation ideas that were presented. They don’t work in the common business model of “sick care”. So what incentives drive change? Eventually, it can only be the citizen and this means society at large demanding new ways to provide healthcare.

3) It is all about co-creating value

Healthcare innovation, in it’s true sense, is not about finding new market opportunities in a current setting. Innovators should focus on value creation, and most of all on demonstrating this value to the ecosystem serving patient needs. In other words: business follows value and not the other way around. So rather than pushing more of the same into an existing market, innovators should focus on opening doors to new fields. In healthcare, this is rarely done by lonesome riders. It needs an ecosystem where different stakeholders are eager to collaborate and co-create.

A big Thank you to all the speaker and supporters who made this DayOne Conference happen.

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Starting with patients – the real experts!

Jérémie Meyer — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 12:30:00 +0000

How can the digital evolution be best adapted to serve patient needs? This was the question that brought 120 healthcare innovators, experts and tech enthusiasts together on April 23, 2020 for the DayOne online event “Tech for patients” to kick off the DayOne Health Hack.

The DayOne Health Hack is more than a hackathon. It is an innovation journey. Conceived as a neutral platform, it is aimed at engaging the healthcare ecosystem to co-create patient-driven healthcare solutions. Starting with real-world patient needs, a consortium of industry stakeholders is committed to helping patients curate their challenges, which will then be brought to the health hackathon taking place on November 7 and 8. This unique DayOne Health Hack journey, co-designed by Innovation-horizon.ch, is strongly supported by Roche, Experientia, Novartis, Microsoft, Takeda, Helsana and Google and made possible through close collaboration with the University Hospital of Basel, the Health Hacking Lab and Eupati CH, as well as CSEM and Swiss Made Software.

In his opening interview at the kick-off event, Steven Bourke from Eupati CH, made clear why engaging patients in the innovation process from the outset is so crucial: “They are the only real experts when it comes to knowing how it really is to be living with a given health condition, and this knowledge has real value.” Claudio Mirti, Data & AI Solutions Specialist at Microsoft, then showed BigTech’s effort to integrate a portfolio of solutions around the patient’s journey. Michele Visciola, CEO of Experientia, made a strong plea to humanize technology and create solutions that go beyond the purely medical, taking into account contextual factors such as social and behavioural aspects of everyday life with a health condition.

Creating an innovation experience with tangible outcomes

The two panel discussions, featuring the partners of the DayOne Health Hack, underlined that patient centricity can only be achieved through an ecosystem approach. For Fatma Nur Ozali and Stefanie Derzsi, who are driving Patient Centricity at Roche, “collaborating within a consortium of multiple stakeholders is one of the things we are most excited about being part of the DayOne Health Hack.” The afternoon sessions brought different topics to the table, each run by consortium partners, and gave a very promising first impression on how the ecosystem can be enabled for crowdsourcing knowledge, skills, data and platforms to create the DayOne Health Hack innovation experience and deliver tangible results, starting with patient needs.

Below are the lessons I personally learned from the DayOne Health Hack Tech for Patients event:

1) “From features & functions-driven to needs-based?” Inventing great technology is one thing. Getting them to work not only for users, but also for human beings is another. Especially when it comes to improving health conditions, simply implementing cool features and functions will not lead to a sustainable product and service. Overcoming this translational gap between what technology can do and what is really needed will be a key success factor in defining and finding solutions to patient-centric challenges.

2) “What’s in it for me?” This is the leading question when it comes to digital solutions, for they will almost certainly depend on sharing data. When it comes to answering this question, neither healthcare providers nor researchers and developers will have the final say — the patients will. Without delivering a tangible outcome for them, patients will hardly invest any effort in engaging with a digital solution and sharing their data.

3) “Sell less, earn more?” If the application of digital technology actually succeeds in creating value for the patient, the even bigger question that arises is: how will this value be distributed among healthcare stakeholders? Given that most digital solutions are not necessarily aimed at delivering a better treatment (at a higher price), but rather at providing a service that helps save costs or even prevents ill-health in the first place, new business models will be needed that rethink the way the ecosystem works as a whole.

More information on the Health Hack.

Watch the recording of the Tech for Patient Kick-off.

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The first patient-centric DayOne Health Hack

Jérémie Meyer — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 10:37:00 +0000

Welcome to DayOne Health Hack 2020.

Save the date! The first patient-centric DayOne Health Hack is hosted in Basel, Switzerland and will take place 7-8 November, 2020.

Imagine…

…patients sharing their insights and everyday needs arising from dealing with their health conditions; not only being heard, but actively listened to.

… a team of professionals, experts and tech enthusiasts that support these patients to turn their challenges into ideas for feasible solutions.

…a crowd of diverse participants offering their digital talent, medical knowledge and innovation skills during a two-day hackathon to create first proof of concept solutions for the patient’s challenges.

…that the best of these proof-of-concepts are presented to a world-class international conference of digital health innovators to find ways to continue beyond the hack stage.

Why we are doing this and how

It is time to explore new ways to innovate in digital healthcare, starting with the patient and aligning the health ecosystem around his/her need. During a two-day event, patients, caregivers, software engineers, as well as healthcare innovators will join forces to co-create tangible proof-of-concept solutions to real challenges.

A unique innovation journey

The DayOne Health Hack is more than a hackathon, it’s a process and a joint effort involving different healthcare stakeholders partnering for a unique innovation journey. At the Tech Event on April 23, we will bring together tech enthusiasts and healthcare innovators from the ecosystem to explore, collect and evaluate tech and skills as well as data ready to use for the hackathon. Register here for participation.

Our patronage partner EUPATI CH will then conduct in depth interviews with patients. Based on these insights the partners of the DayOne Health Hack will then support the patients in further defining their needs and transferring them into hackable challenges.

This will be carried at to the patient centric hackathon taking place in early September and followed by a curation phase to make the real-world patient challenges ready to be worked on at the hackathon taking place on 7-8 November in Basel.

The DayOne Health Hack aims to build a worldwide reference platform for exploring the design of patient driven healthcare solutions. It builds on the strength of Switzerland’s healthcare innovation ecosystem including: patient representing organizations, pharma, med- and healthtech companies, university hospitals, health insurance, open source innovation and tech enthusiast communities.

Principles of the DayOne Health Hack:

Patient-centric: we are all patients or potential patients. Patients are at the core of the DayOne Health Hack initiative, they help define challenges based on their own personal experience as well as that of their peers. “Patient champions” are present during the hackathon providing both first-hand knowledge and inspiration.
Aspirational: “do good, feel good”. The participants are purpose-driven.
Creative and collaborative: release IP constraints, open source software/hardware is encouraged, connection to ongoing open-source initiatives is highly encouraged; in case proprietary platforms are available, the participants “vote with their feet” and choose the tools they prefer during the event.
Relevant and scalable: use industrial-grade techs and patient-relevant data sets to create realistic options for innovation impact during the hackathon. The tech available at the hackathon should be scalable and fit for purpose, to enable the potential for continuity of projects after the hack.
Feasible: curated challenges, the teams sprint for doable hacks. The curation process aims at connecting the patient challenges to the tech available in the ecosystem sponsoring and supporting the hackathon event. No ideation at this stage, but breaking down the patient challenges in doable bits, and possibly selecting challenges deemed possible to be met with tech kit available during hackathon (e.g. data sets, computation, hardware etc.) provided by supporting partners
Supported: ideation occurs at the hackathon. Participants are mentored and supported during the hackathon (e.g. by facilitators, tech experts).
Visibility and Continuity: selected results are invited to show their results at the DayOne Conference. Teams are encouraged to continue projects after the event.

Sponsors and supporting partners:

The DayOne Health Hack is made possible by the contributions of:

Patronage: EUPATI CH – USB – Health Hacking Lab

Gold Partners: Roche, Experientia

Silver Partners: Novartis, Takeda, Helsana, Microsoft

Networking partner: Swiss Made Software

Get involved and shape the DayOne Health Hack:

Be it as a private individual or as part of an organization or a company, your passion and expertise will fuel the co-creation of the next generation patient-driven health solutions. We call on patient advocates, caregivers, medical doctors, technology providers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital, insurances… and creative makers. Your contribution is most welcome!

Are you curious? Participate in our future events. Check out the healthhack.ch site to learn more.

Do you want to get involved as a participant at the Health Hack? Send us a note here.

Do you want to become a partner? Please contact Thomas Brenzikofer.

Do you want to share your insights as a patient? Please contact Steven Bourke, EUPATI CH.

Do you want to contribute with a skill, tech or/and data? Please contact Giovanni Nisato.

Do you want to read more about the DayOne Health Hack? Download our long read below, or visit our microsite: healthhack.ch

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