THREE groups of local technopreneurs, who advanced in the “MassKara Hackathon” in Bacolod City on Tuesday, have developed applications that are mostly beneficial to government medical institutions.
Hackathon is a coding marathon wherein from a seemingly impossible business idea, developers are challenged to create a minimum viable product.
Of the 15 participating teams, the Health Me app, which is a collaboration of technopreneurs from the University of Saint La Salle and Colegio San Agustin-Bacolod, was declared champion.
The app is mainly in support to health centers, particularly among barangays in the city.
Health Me app assists all health centers in monitoring resident-patients with, for instance, vaccination dues and tuberculosis medication, among others.
The system would automatically send out health notifications through short message service (SMS).
The E-Health Card app of a local professional developer ranked second. This in support of the operation and services of the Bacolod City Health Office, where people processing for health cards will no longer go through queuing, but can instead apply online.
The Healthcare Freelance app of the student-technopreneurs of STI West Negros University was in third place.
Healthcare Freelance is a manpower pulling app that would link jobless nurses and other healthcare professionals to private individuals and business processing outsourcing companies trying to source out medical workers.
“These apps are mostly for government use because majority of the contenders had seen that huge gap between the government healthcare providers and the public they are servicing,” John Dave Dueñas, chief executive of HyBrain Software Development Corporation, said.
The top three winners received seed money worth P30,000, P20, 000 and P10,000, respectively.
On top of seed fund, bizparks and incubation at the Negros First Cyber Centre, the winners will also receive free three-month use of facilities of Dojo 8, a co-working space in the city, to further develop their applications.
“These could really benefit public medical institutions thus, aside from helping them technically we would want to help them on how to create companies for technopreneurs who would also like to start a business,” Dueñas said.
The first MassKara Hackathon was organized by the HyBrain Software Development Corp. 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.
This year, it focused on how to alleviate the efficiency level of the medical and healthcare professionals from the administration of the care to the electronic medical records.