- December 30, 2024
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Team Palm Coast with Mayor Milissa Holland. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Runners-up Patient Pilot with Vice Mayor Nick Klufas. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Gerald Condon, Ravil Bikmetov and Ernesto Lucio of fourth-place team MED Bus. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Grand prize winners StressLess. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Jackie Lu and Raj Shah. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Mayor Milissa Holland. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
Bianca Silva and Ramon Morales. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
The hackathon judges. Courtesy of the city of Palm Coast
The Tech Beach Hackathon (a portmanteau of “hack” and “marathon”), an event long sought-after by a City Hall looking to make Palm Coast a technological Mecca, brought together dozens of idea generators and tech experts from all over the country for 24 hours to solve challenges posed by City Hall. The challenges were concocted after consultation with AdventHealth Palm Coast on the biggest issues facing clients of American health care.
The event kicked off Jan. 17 with opening remarks from Mayor Milissa Holland, University of North Florida President David M. Szymanski, Daytona State College President Thomas LoBasso, Florida Department of Education Chancellor (and former Flagler Schools superintendent) Jacob Oliva and others before a networking dinner and outdoor concert by Are Friends Electric.
“We’re excited to partner with AdventHealth to make Palm Coast the success story of Florida,” Szymanski said. “It’s a phenomenal place. It has so much potential. We’re bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and making a difference.”
“Being a part of this is very exciting,” Oliva said. “We want to replicate this throughout the state.”
Twenty-eight tons of sand had been carted onto the lawn behind City Hall along with rented furniture and donated plants to assist the “tech beach” theming dreamed of by Chief Innovation Officer Don Kewley, who was the driving force behind the realization of the hackathon.
“Everyone thought it was nuts,” Kewley said, “but we made it happen.”
The three challenges Kewley set before the teams — many groups of four or five, some pairs of business partners, a few lone wolves — competing for the $6,000 grand prize revolved around the Salesforce platform used at AdventHealth and other hospitals, and they were free to choose whether they would focus on one or tackle multiple:
“The city has been great,” said Patrick Medina from developer relations agency BeMyApp, which helped organize the hackathon. “As soon as we told them what we needed, they were right on it.”
The hackers — “hack” in the same sense as “life hack,” working with preexisting material to improve things — had the option of bringing a sleeping bag or sleeping on cots in City Hall if they wished to work through the night during the 24 hours.
Raj Shah and Jackie Lu, University of Florida students, were working on a system that would let seniors understand their health charges more easily by comparing them to charges of patients for similar services.
“It’s probably going to change over the next 24 hours," Shah said. "We’re still planning it out."
Both had some hackathon experience from college and hoped to use the grand prize to pay off their tuition.
Jonathan Gan, Osaki Pokima, Ramon Morales and Bianca Silva, Florida Polytechnic University students from Lakeland, tackled the first two challenges.
“We’re going to make patient care easier to understand using smart technology,” Gan said. “The way we incorporate this can bring costs down.”
They aimed to design “smart mirrors” for household use which can store and display physical and medical data on a large, accessible surface.
“I want to travel somewhere,” Pokima said of using the prize money. “You could go to Thailand with that, bro.”
“I’m going to get a used car,” Silva said.
“We’re going to use it to mass manufacture our product,” Morales said, laughing. “That’s the correct answer.”
Holland was enthused.
“There is a lot of creativity in this space,” she said. “For the past year, I’ve spent a lot of time in a hospital. It can be an emotional challenge, yet you’re still having to understand the insurance, the billing, managing all the different orders."
She hoped some of the teams would invent concepts for reducing the paperwork and complexity of health care for its patients.
“This will inspire others to ask, ‘What’s else can we do?’” Holland said.
“We want to be a center of innovation of medical technology,” said City Manager Matthew Morton. “This is the first step. I overheard some of the pitches this morning — I had goosebumps, I was blown away by how quickly they grasped the challenges.”
By Jan. 19, the grand prize had been awarded to StressLess, the $3,000 runner up prize to Patient Pilot, the $2,000 third place prize to Team Palm Coast and the fourth place $1,000 prize to MED Bus.
StressLess, created by a group of developers from Orlando and Gainesville areas, is meant to aggregate data from wearable devices such as AppleWatch or Fitbit to measure stress levels and quantifiable reductions in stress through whole health initiatives, according to a city press release.
Team Palm Coast developed an app to revolutionize the way appointments are scheduled. The pair of local developers — one from Flagler Palm Coast High School, the other a student from DSC — noted that no-show appointments cost the health care industry $150 billion per year, according to the press release, which added that both developers on Team Palm Coast have interned at Coastal Cloud, owned by Tim and Sara Hale. Holland also works at Coastal Cloud, which did not serve as a judge in the contest.
AdventHealth Palm Coast COO Wally De Aquino said, in a city press release, that he was excited for StressLess's real world applications and that he was excited to pair the app's developers with his team and see what they could come up with.
