Tackling Regional Public Health Issues Using Mobile Health Technology: Event Report of an mHealth Hackathon in Thailand

Hackathons are intense, short, collaborative events focusing on solving real world problems through interdisciplinary teams. This is a report of the mHealth hackathon hosted by Khon Kaen University in collaboration with MIT Sana and faculty members from Harvard Medical School with the aim to improve health care delivery in the Northeast region of Thailand. Key health challenges, such as improving population health literacy, tracking disease trajectory and outcomes among rural communities, and supporting the workflow of overburdened frontline providers, were addressed using mHealth. Many modifications from the usual format of hackathon were made to tailor the event to the local context and culture, such as the process of recruiting participants and how teams were matched and formed. These modifications serve as good learning points for hosting future hackathons. There are also many lessons learned about how to achieve a fruitful collaboration despite cultural barriers, how to best provide mentorship to the participants, how to instill in the participants a sense of mission, and how to match the participants in a fair and efficient manner. This event showcases how interdisciplinary collaboration can produce results that are unattainable by any discipline alone and demonstrates that innovations are the fruits of collective wisdom of people from different fields of expertise who work together toward the same goals.