iQube Labs, Health Central and Health IT have emerged as winners of the first ever healthcare hackathon.
The Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria (PHN), the public private institution led by Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Mr. Bill Gates, Mr. Jim Ovia, Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Mr. Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, Mrs. Sola David Borha, Muntaqa Umar-sadiq and others, convened the first ever healthcare hackathon on February 22 at No. 296, Herbert Macaulay Way, Lagos.
Teams of tech entrepreneurs participated in the day long hackathon where PHN provided representative healthcare datasets that included facility level, household and programmatic data points for the leading causes of mortality, including malnutrition and malaria.
In addition, locations of primary healthcare centers and referral hospitals in all 36+1 states in the country were unveiled with state level human resource for health data and other socio-economic indicators.
Aliko Dangote, founding patron, PHN, meeting the winner of the healthcare hackathon, iQube Labs, said that “as part of the innovation pillar of the Alliance, we recently launched the Nigeria Health Innovation Marketplace (NHIM), an intervention aimed at providing a convergence platform for identifying and incubating innovative health products, technologies and approaches.
He said this is in a bid to provide market linkages to enable promising health innovations such as iQube Labs achieve scale and impact on the nation’s effort in meeting Millennium Development Goals (MDG) 4, 5 and 6’.
iQube Labs used PHN healthcare datasets to develop an innovative mobile health solution to address supply chain challenges for essential health commodities and incorporated GIS/crowd sourcing layers to potentially estimate alternative routes to support the distribution and management of drugs in crises prone states.
Health Central showcased an integrated predictive service delivery tool while Health IT provided access and info about health infrastructure and human resources for health mapping to empower patients.
Jim Ovia, co-chair of PHN, congratulated the winners, stating that the NHIM comprises 3 core elements: virtual health innovation portal, health innovation hub/incubator and health innovation challenges/hackathons.
During the landmark hackathon, Muntaqa Umar-sadiq, the CEO of the Private Sector Health Alliance, in his remarks, stated that “it is humbling to see an army of computer programmers and tech entrepreneurs develop mobile and ICT solutions that will empower the true heroines of the Saving One Million Lives Movement: the thousands of midwives, female community and village health workers, working in many rural areas across the country to save the lives of women, newborns and children”.
Umar-sadiq said that PHN has engaged different segments of its private sector members to co-develop and unveil innovative partnership projects to contribute to the Saving One Million Lives Movement.
The private sector members, according to him, are telecommunication members, financial institution members, pharma/FMCGs members, healthcare providers, amongst others.
Kelechi Ohiri, the technical lead of the Saving One Million Lives Initiative and special adviser to the minister of health, added that “with access to data and capital, we believe that the tech community can play an important role in creating the enabling environment to accelerate progress in saving at least one million lives by 2015”.
Source: BusinessDayOnline
