Hackathons have grown in popularity almost in parallel with the growth in the agile software devevelopment methodology that they’ve sprung out of. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, they’re usually run over the course of a single day, and involve various teams attempting to hack together a prototype application as well as they can in that timeframe. They usually have a sponsoring organization who provide various tools, data and personnel to help the teams in their task, and there is a steady stream of coffee, beer and pizza to fuel participants.
Traditionally these events have been innovation-orientated, with sponsors aiming to attract developers, designers, UX specialists and so on together to build creative prototypes of applications that can then be developed further. Often these would be aimed at external audiences, but sometimes organizations would put on hackathons for internal teams too.
So attractive have these events become that organizations have even been using them to find and assess talent. The rationale is that by putting people through their paces in such an intense environment, you get a great insight into not only their technical capabilities, but how they work with others.
Hacking learning
Perhaps a less well travelled path is to use hackathons for learning. As recent research from Ohio State University shows however, the informal nature of the events provide an excellent environment for learning a variety of technical skills. The researchers assessed the annual hackathon run by the university that typically attracted a few hundred student participants. They not only received support from faculty, but the events proved incredibly effective at facilitating peer-to-peer support and mentoring.
“Due to the gamified format of the events, students were heavily motivated to learn new skills due to practical applicability and peer effects, rather than merely academic metrics,” the authors explain. “Some teams continued their hacks as long-term projects, while others formed new student groups to host lectures and practice building prototypes on a regular basis.”
The hackathon hosted at the Medidata NEXT conference was very much in this vein, with the software company, who make technology to support clinical trials, using the event to help existing and future customers familiarize themselves with their platform.
Five teams descended on London for 12 hours of intense activity as they endeavoured to pull together useful applications from the cloud-based clinical data management system Medidata Rave. Contestants were judged on the completeness of their applications, how much they had utilized the Medidata platform, the user interface and the overall usefulness of the application to clinical trials.
Crash course
Participants were drawn from across the pharma and bioinformatics sectors, with representatives from organizations as diverse as Johnson & Johnson and the NIHR. The winning team heralded from biopharmaceutical services company Parexel. They attended the hackathon because whilst they had been using the Medidata platform previously, they were by no means fluent with it, and the hackathon provided an intense crash course that allowed them not only to learn from the Medidata experts on site, but to put their learning into practice during the day.
Their app aimed to reduce the incidences of errors occurring in data entry during clinical trials, which research has highlighted can have a profound impact upon the analyses that are performed downstream. The team attempted to overcome this by using artificial intelligence to process and assess the data to ensure it’s correct. The prototype system allowed for informed consent documents to be photographed, with the system then analyzing the image and input directly into Rave.
The team hoped to further develop on their initial prototype in the coming weeks, with Danish pharma company Lundbeck an inspiration to follow. Representatives from the company had attended a previous Medidata hackathon and developed a mobile health app for depression assessments. The team were comfortable with developing iOS applications, but plugging them into a platform like Medidata was unfamiliar territory.
“Three years ago we were thrilled to enter, and win, the very first Medidata Symposium Hackathon. Tasked with developing a product that could support clinical research using Medidata’s software, we created a mobile app that helped assess patients’ mood, compliance with trial medication and provide an overview of upcoming visits in the trial. Taking part in the hackathon, with the guidance from the Medidata team, gave us the insight and confidence to move forward with implementing apps in our clinical trials.” Alastair Clewlow, Senior Director, Clinical Data Management, Programming & Systems at Lundbeck says.
Hackathons are not commonly used to product onboarding purposes, but the example of Medidata shows some of the results that can be achieved when they do have that focus.
