I had the opportunity to attend HealthHack this year and it was amazing.
Friday night: Pitches and Team forming
Like most hackathons, the night starts with food and networking. This is a chance to ask people what brings them HealthHack and catch up with old colleagues from previous projects. I’m lucky enough to know people from ThoughtWorks and Genie Solutions as I’ve worked with these companies in the past.
Next is the pitches, in which problem owners have a limited amount of time to present their problem(s) and have questions at the end of their pitch. I was particularly impressed with Fin and Arwen who are currently the youngest problem owners to present at a HealthHack. For anyone to get in front of a crowd at any age can be daunting so my hat goes off to you both.
Fin and Arwen tell their story of experiencing anxiety, fear, and uncertainty when admitted to the hospital. Ultimately they want a solution that can ease this fear and anxiety when in a disempowering situation of being in a hospital.
After all the pitches are done it’s time for match-making. This involves essentially speed-dating the problem owners and finding a problem that you would like to solve with the skills you have.
Essentially, I felt drawn to the problem as my background as an ex-nurse (not paedatric), that is skilled in coding and designing websites and apps.
The team initially starts off with Seb (and Ivy), Yvonne and I asking lots of questions to find the core problem. After a few goes of trying to evaluate the core problem, we ask for more help from the HealthHack organisers and moderators to help us find more people to join the team. Jarred, Sheree and Dr. Sunil join the team and we are now confident with our team to move forward to tackle the problem.
Jarred suggested that we write down all our ideas no matter how crazy they are on post-its and share it with the team. This works really well to see common themes and help us move forward to a starting point for design and development. As a team, we decided given the current time and resources which ideas we should start to investigate.
Some really great ideas are presented, there was one which I wish we had time to explore which as having staff profiles for kids available so they knew certain facts (like favourite colour, favourite superhero etc) about their nurse or doctor to make them more relatable and familiar.
The night ends with lots of questions and confirming arrival times for the next morning.
Team: What’s up Kid?
- Development: Jarred, Seb and I
- Visual Design: Sheree and I
- Ideation and Prototyping: Ivy
- Facilitation & Research: Yvonne, Dr. Sunil
Saturday — Work work work work work
The day starts with taking my 3-year-old son to gymnastics then heading to HealthHack. I had to explain that we were going to “Daddy’s Work”.
So did I mention that HealthHack has free childcare! I think it’s such a great way to show how inclusive this event is. It’s not often you get to bring your 3yo to an event like this, so I lept at the chance. In addition, I could also test the product we were building with my son.
One of the many challenges we faced that day was not having a clear understanding of what we were building. Fortunately, thanks to some HealthHack Mentors we got a bit more clarity on and guidance on where we should start.
Essentially we wanted an app that made it easy for a person aged 4–8 years old to express how they were feeling when a staff member interacted with them.
So with that in mind while the mentors were working with the facilitators and problem owners. The development and design (product team) got started. We had to build essentially from scratch. So it had to be Lean.
Sheree would check-in with the problem owners to ensure that visual elements were on point. Jarred and I had both had Ionic v3 and Firebase experience (which made life that much simpler). We decided that Jarred is better with data structure and state management, and I would do authentication and start to build out the user flow.
I found this experience of splitting the work quite smooth (surprisingly). Seb was keen to start data capture part and visualisation from a staff perspective.
TL;DR
- Data Structure and State management for Nurse view (Jarred)
- Authentication, UI Development for Child view, (Me)
- Nurse view for data visualisation aka Charts (Seb)
- UI Assets and Branding (Sheree)
Sunday: Time to cut scope and Ship it!
After an intense day previously, fighting package dependencies and other various issues we were still finding ourselves without a shared understanding and user flow of what to build. We had the pieces but we were concerned that they didn’t fit in a cohesive way.
I had mocked out a rough user flow the night before at home and was keen to get it across the team…
It would start with a login screen where a child chooses their favourite colour which would log them into the app, then a parent would have a place to type their name and the child would pick a face on how they were feeling. Then it would present a list of reasons in a visual way to ask why they were feeling that way. Then it would present a basic body chart to ask where the issue was. The pressure was on the get done by 3 pm as that is when we stop everything to present what we have done.
The team had a shared understanding and solid plan so it was all hands on deck. It was so intense I’m pretty sure I was still coding until the last few seconds because I had completely broken the colour functionality. Kudos to Jarred for deploying the app!
I am so proud of what we had achieved in a short amount of time.
Demo
I had to get home to both my kids for bath and dinner time so unfortunately, I couldn’t stay to see Finn and Arwen demo What’s up Kid live and in person.
Later that night I saw this on our Slack channel:
We won 3rd for Product and 2nd for Design. I was ecstatic!
I was already so proud of what we had achieved over a weekend and it was the cherry on top of the cake to know that we had been placed amongst some really cool projects.
Conclusion
HealthHack was a great experience as I got to meet friends old and new; My son got to experience a snippet of what I do; I was able to contribute to a team to solve real problems;
If this is something you are remotely interested in I highly recommend signing for the next HealthHack. I know I will be.
