Lightning Talks

We have some lightning talks lined up for this week! If you want to talk about something you learned recently or are working on, e-mail me (michael@aqua.io)... or just come and chime in when we open up the floor at the end.

Rob Marano (@robmarano) talks about his recent experiences visiting one of the most technologically sophisticated NHS hospitals in the UK, and The Hackerati's own plans for creating similar systems that can transform healthcare in the U.S. From Rob: Just like the open source community banded together to reduce the overall cost of delivering automation for businesses, so too can they do it now with healthcare. Big Data and Big Data analytics in the form of Hadoop + Flume + HBase + Mahout together will deliver cost efficient and effective decision support systems to healthcare professionals, payors, patients, and public health officials right now. I've seen what technology can do at one particular NHS hospital in the UK, and we can do the same here. In the U.S., the average individual takes 4 prescription medications daily, and folks over 65 take 5 to 6 prescriptions daily. It is with this audience in mind that Susan Crayne presents SideEffects, an app she built for iPhone that meshes together an individuals' prescription regimen and provides an intuitive interface for understanding which medications may be at the root of particular symptoms or side effects. Last, we have a brainstorming session! Daisy Tsao will talk about her project www.myfamilyvillage.com, which is seeking to create a database of cheap (or free) community child development services. Daisy will talk about the challenges she's had with finding enough data to make the site viable so far, and then we'll open it up for a few minutes of informal brainstorming from the audience--bring your ideas and help myfamilyvillage get off the ground.

About Health Hacker Hours

Health Hacker Hours is a casual opportunity for programmers working in health to come, talk shop, get code help, or just hack in the presence of other health hackers. We shamelessly ripped off the idea from the awesome folks at NYC on Rails. Come to Health Hacker Hours if you...

• Want some help with code you've been working on.
• Would like to get feedback on or share a health hack that you are coding yourself.
• Hope to discuss unique health hacking problems (like HIPAA compliance or interoperability) or standards (HL7, Blue Button, etc.) with others who have already suffered through them.