How might we better understand the needs of high-risk patients within a safety net hospital system?
This was the central question for which we were tasked to organize NYC Health + Hospital’s Office of Population Health’s first hackathon.
We worked with design professionals to gain insight into design jam and hackathon best practices, and adapt them to a healthcare setting.
Potential activities were tested with a working group from the Office of Population Health from several departments in order to best narrow down the activity goals and run-of-show.
This group also targeted invitees from across the hospital system in order to gather as representative a group as possible of the range of touch points that comprise high-risk patient care, from patients themselves, to registration staff, clinical staff, care coordination staff, and the data teams that collect and track clinical data.
Teams were broken out to include members from as many different roles as possible to maximize cross-pollination and diversity of perspective.
Teams were tasked with developing patient profiles, creating patient journey maps that included their sphere of control both within the hospital system and outside in community at large. Brainstorming sprints culminated in intervention proposals demonstrated through storyboarding.
Skills employed
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In a team of two, me and a coworker planned all aspects of the event, from venue to run-of-show. Our efforts were largely supported and informed by input from volunteers from a range of design firms, and from subject matter experts across several departments of Health + Hospitals.
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Created activity plans for groups to develop patient profiles around different high risk patient archetypes. Archetypes were developed with input from subject matter experts during the event planning process.
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One goal of the hackathon was to generate input on the various needs of high risk patients in our system, as well as what pathways existed and should exist for these patients within our system.
Lessons learned
While this event was a success in its turnout and positive feedback received from participants, ultimately the interventions proposed through hackathon outputs were never fully explored. This is large part due to the absence of resources and capacity allocated to design sprints that could have been used to research, test, prototype, and iterate upon these interventions. Being the largest public health system in the country, and one that at the time was working with extremely clunky data platforms, NYC Health + Hospitals often had to sacrifice agility for other competing priorities.