Healthcare Innovation at the Core of TeleTracking

A record setting 21 teams with representation from Pittsburgh, Nashville, Minneapolis and Bangalore submitted their project ideas for TeleTracking's Summer Hackathon! Employees from software engineering, product management, UI/UX and technical support teamed up to bring their ideas to life. “I feel really lucky to work with the people who thought up all of these ideas, and to work for a company that lets us take the time to make them real,” said Katie McTigue, UI Designer.

Several of TeleTracking’s summer interns were integrated into the various hackathon teams. It was the first corporate hackathon event for many of them.

Software engineering intern, Prarthana S., shared, “I picked up valuable knowledge such as best practices in software architecture and engineering. My team used the programming language Elm and the web framework Phoenix to build a lightweight and scalable user presence service that could be seamlessly integrated in our company product. It was highly motivating to work on something that would save precious time and effort for TeleTracking customers.”

The hackathon allowed interns to experiment with new technology as well. “I wanted to work on NLP (natural language processing) for quite some time and this hackathon gave me a start in it and I plan to pursue it further,” said Aanchal M., software engineering intern. Her hackathon teammate, Jeffin B., also added, “Our team used Python, MySQL, Google Cloud API and RabbitMQ as the main tech stacks. It was really a good chance for us to learn something new and gain valuable development experience.”

For several days, teams worked on tackling a variety of different healthcare challenges. Ideas around new potential products, enhancements to existing products and improvements to existing internal processes were shared with the company. Intriguing ideas included Team Mapping Madness which created a hospital location mapping and flow application. Team Roll Call developed a real time collaborative user presence within TeleTracking’s current IQ platform which allowed every user to see one another making live changes. Team Automated Health Check presented a tool to provide system health checks, exportation and sharing which could help our technical support team better help customers in the future. Lastly, Team TeleCares built a mobile application for employees to allow for more efficient tracking of activities through TeleTracking’s Wellness Program.

The overall winner was -- Team Remember the Alamo! They provided a mobile solution to automate the manual processes that many health systems use to implement and standardize their approach to hand-off communications between clinical caregivers and the transport teams. Their solution creatively used technologies such as .NET, ReactNative with Redux Mobile App to create an application that would allow healthcare caregivers scan barcodes, request two-way authentication and remove the traditional paper tracking process. This would help improve the patient experience during hand-offs and reduce potential error.