Surgical hackathon team devises ‘street smart’ solution

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) collaboration with Harvard’s Health Systems Innovation Lab (HSIL), the UCT Surgical Society and Global Surgery concluded its two-day surgical hackathon on 12 April, with team Authentic Intelligence announced the overall winners. They walked away with R1 000 worth of Satrix Now vouchers for each team member.

The winning team came up with an app called Street Smarts: an interactive, age-appropriate game that teaches children about bodily autonomy, consent, unsafe/safe touch, secrets and boundaries, and where to get help if they are feeling unsafe at home or at school. It is aimed at preventing sexual abuse of children and protecting them against abusers.

The hackathon theme over the two days was aimed at developing artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solutions to improve healthcare systems worldwide. Over the two days, teams worked intensely to refine their ideas under the mentorship of leading industry experts, surgeons, AI specialists and business strategists. Participants received hands-on guidance from mentors affiliated with Harvard, UCT, and the global tech and healthcare industries.

Successful teams will receive an exclusive invitation to Harvard HSIL’s Venture Incubation programme, planned for May 2025. This programme will provide mentorship, business development support, and access to investors and healthcare stakeholders, enabling participants to scale their solutions into real-world applications.

“The technology is leaping ahead; can we make the most use of it, and can we make the most [of it] with the data at our disposal?”

On Friday, 11 April, Dr Pierre Barker, the chief scientific officer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), addressed participants on the theme “Creating high-value health systems through innovation and improvement”.

The welcome speech was delivered by UCT’s head of global surgery, Professor Salome Maswime, who said that the reason the organisers decided on a hackathon was because South Africa has some of the worst health outcomes on the continent. “Access is a huge problem for low-and medium-income countries. Healthcare systems matter. Where you are in the world can determine what outcomes you will have. We are having this health systems hackathon because we focus too much on discovering medicine – new innovations – yet access remains a huge challenge on the continent.”

Dr Barker began by speaking about the symbiotic relationship which must exist between technology and humans. Barker oversees IHI’s cutting-edge innovation, design and learning activities, ensuring that people maximise the opportunities for impact, and that practical improvement methods and tools are accessible to all who seek to improve health and healthcare.

AI well positioned

“What I found, as I continued to take care of patients, was that what I had been taught at medical school was difficult for me to execute because the systems that were supposed to support me were not working so well,” said Barker. “I came across IHI when I was trying to run our patient system for a busy children’s hospital in North Carolina, in the United States of America. I realised I didn’t have the skills as a trained doctor to improve the systems for everyone, and that’s what got me excited about IHI.

“I have embraced AI; I use it to help me do my work. The question is: how can we make AI work for us, and help us to do our jobs? AI is very well positioned to help us adapt to the changing circumstances we find ourselves in. The technology is leaping ahead; can we make the most use of it, and can we make the most [of it] with the data at our disposal?”

A recurring question is whether AI can make patient care better. According to Barker, this can be measured against safety, efficiency, patient centredness and equitability. “This balances our hopes about AI and our responsibility to make sure we don’t do harm by bringing AI into our systems. The three main ways in which AI is going to be helping clinical care in the next several years are [firstly] around clinical documentation; the second is clinical decision support; and the third is patient support – how patients will use AI to be better informed, and to make better decisions,” he said.

To wrap up the conversation and to leave participants with some advice, he spoke briefly about the concept of quality improvement, which is characterised by four elements of system change: the psychology of change; systems thinking; using continuous data for improvement; and rapid testing and learning.

The winning team included Ludolph Pedro, Bunono Frans, Wanda Madasa, Rahul Rama-Panchia and Simphiwe Malinga.