CajunCodeFest competition highlights patient engagement

Teams of health IT gurus, entrepreneurs and students soon will set out on a 27-hour odyssey to transform data into healthcare solutions. The April 24-26 “hackathon” at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Business & Information Technologies--billed the CajunCodeFest--is a health app coding competition that will award $25,000 to the team who comes up with the best product.

In its second year, the event's slogan is “Own your Own Health” and is attracting some high-end names, including National Coordinator for Health IT Farzad Mostashari, MD, ScM.

Lucas Tramontozzi, chief technology officer at the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, sponsor of the event, recently spoke with Clinical Innovation + Technology to amp up buzz on the Cajun hackathon.  

“Federal and locally we’ve come to the conclusion that we don’t have enough resources to do all the amazing things necessary with the amount of data that we sit on. One of the most basic things, and value-added things we can do, is crowd source a lot of this activity,” explained Tramontozzi.

The event will allow teams to work with research--valid, de-identified Medicaid data for 200,000 beneficiaries. “It will be significant. It will be 15 million rows of data that coders will get two days to sit down with and work as a team to build apps that will get people to gain insights into their health,” Tramontozzo said.

The CajunCodeFest is "our first big push to go beyond the Blue Button Initiative,” he said. “We are looking at how to add value on top of that. We want to demonstrate that we can create these tools for people to use.”

Tramontozzi said the event focuses squarely on personal engagement as a means to move the dial on public health. “Until we allow our residents to be accountable for their own health, we are never going to achieve systematic outcomes that we all desire. Namely, we’ve not made it easy for people to do that,” he said.

The effort affects Tramontozzi not only professionally, but personally.“My wife sees a different doctor at a different clinic than my children, and I’m in a different system entirely. So do I have to manage three different health records for my family, or we can work with people to allow them to bring the data together with whatever tool they choose, so in that way they can manage their health?”

More information on the event is available online.