Why We Hack
by Hannah Grossman and Bianca Barela
Every quarter, the One Medical Technology Team hosts a hackathon. The first hackathon was held in 2012 and the small but mighty tech team hacked for 24 hours straight. Since then we have evolved our process to alternate between two-day hackathons and five-day hack weeks. In August 2022, we hosted our 29th hackathon! That translates to one hackathon a quarter for the past seven years.
We value and prioritize this time for a number of reasons. Hacking allows us to explore creative solutions to problems and learn from experimenting, without the pressure to ship or produce a polished finished product.
Hacking is also a way to break the norms. We get together socially, explore working with other teams, and generally have fun!
Everyone on the Technology Team is able to participate in the Hackathon, including Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, Data Scientists, Machine Learning, IT, and Security. Our clinical technical advisory team is also invited to participate. This allows for excellent cross-team collaboration and relationship building which is often harder to achieve in normal day-to-day work.
No matter your title or expertise, you can participate in the hackathon in a variety of ways:
- Pitch an idea during our kickoff meeting;
- advise a team as a key stakeholder;
- join a project or recruit your own team;
- shadow a hackathon team; and / or
- just set aside a few days or even hours to hack on an idea or learn something new!
We encourage the whole team to clear schedules when possible so that we can really get into the creative spirit.
Hackathon Themes
For one of our hackathons in 2022, our theme was “Hack to the 90s”. Yes, every hackathon has a theme! A rotating group of about eight cross-functional volunteers from across the Tech Team come together every quarter to plan and implement each hackathon. This opportunity is open to anyone on the Tech Team and we consider it to be the longest running hackathon “project.” The committee is responsible for coming up with a new theme and a variety of experiences to give the team opportunities to take a break and connect socially. The committee also runs the kick-off meeting and manages all communication around the hackathon. Having a theme allows us to make each hackathon engaging and fresh every quarter.
As a hackathon tradition at One Medical, time is set aside for early morning coffee chats where hackathon groups can brainstorm with other teammates about their projects. To fit with this quarter’s theme, these morning sessions were accompanied by a soundtrack of jamming hits from the 90s. This time we were also lucky enough to participate in Drag Queen Bingo, hosted by none other than Cookie Couture. Prizes were awarded to three bingo winners who got to choose from a selection of gift boxes including: Japanese snacks, traditional Indian spices, and an assortment of breads.
Project Inspiration
The type of projects that participants take on span from conquering technical debt or tackling an issue they experience day-to-day, to inventing an idea or feature that is completely outside the scope of One Medical’s traditional domain. Three projects of note from “Hack to the 90s” include:
Persistent Personas
Working as a software or quality assurance engineer requires sufficient testing of our new products and features. This relies on consistent test data and users that capture the myriad of patients, providers, and admins we have using One Medical’s services every day. One hackathon team created a subset of test users that capture exactly this. Now, instead of logging in with the test users that everyone utilizes, fresh and custom personas exist to accurately represent the types of roles One Medical supports.
Health Homebase
Technology rules the world, and most of us rely on the support that our smart phones provide us to efficiently and effectively navigate life’s regularly scheduled programming. With Apple’s adoption of home screen widgets, why not have one for One Medical that allows patients to complete action items, book visits, and message their provider from the convenience of their iOS device’s landing page? A group spent their hackathon researching and prototyping one of these widgets which hopefully soon will be a fully incorporated part of the patient experience.
Urgent Fax Prediction
Machine learning relies heavily on the presence of labeled data; however, generating this labeled data is often a time consuming and error-prone process. One Medical receives an abundance of faxes every day from our health system partners and some of these are more urgent than others. Upon opening up a new fax, admins now have the ability to mark each fax as urgent or not. This will label data as it is processed into the One Medical system, allowing machine learning algorithms to utilize these labels to create a supervised learning algorithm able to predict the urgency of a fax document before it is introduced to an admin queue.
Funnel for Future Feature Work
Hackathon projects also become inspiration for work in future quarters. For example, a group from Hackathon in Q2 2021 took on the project of revamping the primary care provider selection page for our members. While functionally sufficient, this page lacked the modern design and flow that One Medical proudly displays throughout the remainder of the patient’s profile. This project was then prioritized for one of our member facing teams in Q4 2021 and utilized the scaffolded engineering work contributed during the hackathon. The new PCP selection page lives where it always has, but it matches the fresher look with updated functionality to aid in searching for and viewing providers. This high impact hackathon project paved the way for a real change to be seen in how our patients select their primary care providers.
Consider your own Hackathon
As a great way to bring all corners of our technology organization together, hackathon remains a staple in One Medical’s DNA. The benefit gained from this is evident in how the fun social events bring together working groups to ideate and develop on new ideas. Whether other technology groups choose to implement a hackathon, or something similar, taking the time away from traditional day-to-day work for a more fun and creative mental outlet will greatly benefit the organization.
