FIFTEEN potential applications, specifically for medical and healthcare industry, developed by groups of local technopreneurs, mostly students, were showcased at the first “MassKara Hackaton” held at the STI West Negros University in Bacolod City Tuesday, October 18.
“Hackaton is a coding marathon wherein from a seemingly impossible business idea, we wanted the developers to create a minimum viable product,” John Dave Dueñas, chief executive of HyBrain Software Development Corporation, said.
Dueñas said the “MassKara Hackaton” focuses on how to alleviate the efficiency level of the medical and healthcare professionals from the administration of care to electronic medical records.
“There is really a prevalently big gap in making use of ICT in the medical and health care industry,” he said, adding that some of the applications produced through Hackatons include Spotify and Tinder.
Participating technopreneurs are composed of three teams of professional developers and 12 groups from various schools such as University of the Philippines-Visayas, Carlos Hilado Memorial State College, STI West Negros University, University of Negros Occidental-Recoletos, and University of Saint La Salle.
The teams were given 24 hours to create applications that will mainly address problems and challenges in the medical and healthcare industry.
Some of those created by the participants include mental health text application that will connect the patient to psychologist or psychiatrist, and electronic medical record app.
The winning application will receive a P30,000 seed fund while the second and third placers will get P20,000 and P10,000, respectively.
On top of the seed money that could be mobilized by technopreneurs, Microsoft is also giving them bizparks like P250,000 worth of applications that they could really create.
Dueñas said that technopreneurs will also be assisted to scale up through incubation to address the need for platform to create applications and make it viable to the market.
“Through this first Hackaton, the Manila people were able to see that the maturity of the applications made by our technopreneurs are actually those which will be presenting solutions to the problem that we have in the medical field,” Dueñas added.
The event was organized by the HyBrain Software Development Corporation comprised of young developers catering to local and foreign clients mainly for information management system, along with the Bacolod-Negros Occidental Federation for Information and Communications Technology (BNefit) and Horsepower.ph and other partners like the Microsoft Philippines and Healthylitics, among others.
Medical and healthcare is billions worth of industry but not being tapped fully thus, it is high time that the city will not lose its talents to Manila and Cebu, Dueñas said.