‘It has big ramifications for patient care’ – winner of medical visualisation hackathon 

Eight teams at Product Forge’s hackathon, ‘Medical Visualisation Product Forge’, presented their prototypes to improve medical care on Sunday evening, at CodeBase in Edinburgh. The winning team, Relay, made up of Alasdair Corbett, Katie Reay, Ragna Soennecken, and Fatimah Ravat, showcased their project ‘RelayMedFlag’, an integration system for multiple clinicians to contribute notes on a single patient.

The  innovation that has the potential to minimise the margin for error, and aid the current fractured communication system between healthcare professionals. Katie Reay, a clinical participant from team Relay said: “If our product comes to fruition, I think that would be phenomenal. I really believe that it’s a huge problem that we’re trying to tackle and I think it has big ramifications for patient care.”

As medical personnel face increasing challenges including staff shortages, and expanding volumes of data, the goal of the weekend was to find new ways to effectively analyse large amounts of medical data to aid medical staff in clinical decision making, and improving patient outcomes.

The event took participants through the process of team formation, market research, and prototype development culminating in Sunday evening’s pitch presentations to a judging panel comprised of Kate Ho, of Sainbury’s Bank, Robert Lewis, of Toshiba Medical Visualisation Systems Europe, and Dr Chris Oliver, of Edinburgh University and consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon for the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

Dr Oliver said: “It’s great to see young people developing ideas; they are the next generation, and they will be the leaders of the future.”

Sheena MacCormick, business development manager at Scottish Health Innovations, added: “I think that this is a really interesting type of event for SHIL to be involved with because we’re trying to help medical staff come up with innovative ideas so knowing what other possibilities are open is very useful.”

Watch the highlights here.

Product Forge brings together developers, creatives and entrepreneurs to build new products that solve real world problems.  It run hackathons with a twist; our hack events develop teams and products that tackle society’s hardest challenges. Participants use design thinking and digital technology to rapidly prototype their ideas, with support from mentors who have real world commercial experience. Product Forge also livestreams for a range of technology, design and enterprise events, including interviews with startup founders and entrepreneurs.