What happened at the 18th ICID's 2018 Hackathon in Buenos Aires

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What happened at the 18th ICID’s 2018 Hackathon in Buenos Aires

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April 26, 2018

Current situation

Today, 2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services and 4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services. Unsafe hygiene practices are widespread, compounding the effects on people’s health. The impact on child mortality rates is devastating with more than 340,000 children under five dying annually from diarrhoeal diseases due to poor sanitation, poor hygiene, or unsafe drinking water – almost 1,000 children per day.

What is a hackathon and how can it help?

The hackathon format originated in IT. It combines the concept of hacking (programing quickly and roughly) with that of a marathon (a long-lasting or difficult task or activity) and describes a short period of time spent by people working intensively in teams, starting from scratch, on the building, creating and delivery of working prototype software. The hackathon format has now been adopted by other fields who use it to bring diverse groups of people together for short, fixed periods of time to solve a wide variety of problems and challenges in environments that are conducive to sparking and evolving innovative ideas into solutions.

At the 18th International Congress on Infectious Diseases in Buenos Aires

On February 27th, 2018, 37 motivated individuals came together, each representing a different educational and professional background, determined to solve challenges associated with water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). Participants represented 15 countries from 5 continents making the 18th ICID’s Hackathon a truly international event.

At the start participants had the opportunity to pitch a problem they would like to solve and out this process 8 teams formed, all comprising a different mix of knowledge, experience, perspectives and skills that would hopefully enable the teams to develop new solutions to the problems they wanted to solve. Supporting them were mentors with experience in healthcare, business entrepreneurship and data science who all volunteered their time.

At the end of the 3 day event, teams presented their solutions to a panel of 4 judges who assessed the ideas based on their innovativeness, novelty, scalability and overall feasibility. All teams were in the running for a variety of awards intended to enable teams to continue to develop their solutions after the end of the event. These included a $1,500 USD Elsevier Foundation Award which was won by Mosquito Hunters who proposed the roll-out of a mobile application to coincide with Argentina’s Mosquito Week that would allow children to identify and document mosquito breeding sites before they had a chance to produce disease spreading vectors.

The 18th ICID’s Hackathon was organized by ISID, the Masschusetts Institution of Technology (MIT) Hacking Medicine Group, healthsites.io and Emprear.

Track the progress of solutions developed at the 18th ICID’s Hackathon

Types

Esmita Charani

She is an honorary Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town, a visiting Researcher at Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway, and an Adjunct Professor at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kerala, India, where she is involved in helping implement and investigate national antibiotic stewardship programmes.

After completing her post-graduate training in Cambridge University Hospitals and ten years of experience as a clinical pharmacist in hospitals, Esmita began her research career. In her academic career the focus of her research has been behaviour change interventions in the field of antimicrobial stewardship, and the application of social science research methods to develop contextually relevant solutions. She is an investigator on an NIHR Invention for Innovation award investigating the development and use of a point-of-care personalised clinical decision support tool for antimicrobial prescribing, and is co-investigator on the ESRC award: “Optimising antibiotic use along surgical pathways: addressing antimicrobial resistance and improving clinical outcomes” (in England, Scotland, Rwanda, India & South Africa; 2017-2021).

Her work in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been recognised through an Academy of Medical Sciences UK-India AMR Visiting Professor award. She is an expert advisor to the Commonwealth Pharmacy Association and a Global Health Fellow with the Office of the Chief Pharmaceutical Officer, England. She is involved in mentoring and supporting clinical pharmacists to implement antimicrobial stewardship interventions across different healthcare settings and economies. Her doctoral thesis investigated antimicrobial stewardship in India, Norway, France, Burkina Faso and England. She is also the Research Lead for Practice, Design and Engineering at the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit for Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance within the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London.

Esmita completed her Masters (MPharm Hons) in Pharmacy at University College London, her MSc in Infectious Diseases at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and read for her PhD at Imperial College London.

Yenew Kebede Tebeje

Dr Yenew Kebede Tebeje is a medical microbiologist and public health expert with 20 years of clinical, teaching, laboratory science, research, capacity building, and programme design and management experience. His achievements include building laboratory systems in low-income countries, human resource capacity development, and development of policy frameworks and guidelines that impact laboratory programmes in Africa. Dr Tebeje currently serves as Head of Division of Laboratory Systems at Africa CDC where he leads programmes to strengthen public health laboratory systems and networks in Africa. In this capacity, he coordinates the establishment and strengthening of regional integrated surveillance and laboratory networks, creation of frameworks for cross-border specimen transportation, geo-mapping of laboratory functions, implementation of biosafety and biosecurity standards, use of point of care technologies and connected diagnostics to strengthen surveillance at community level, and implementation of laboratory quality management systems. He also leads initiatives by Africa CDC and partners to advance the use of laboratory diagnostics for universal health coverage and implementation of health security in Africa. Before joining Africa CDC, Dr Tebeje worked for more than 12 years as Technical Officer and later as Branch Chief for Laboratory at the US CDC in Ethiopia, where he provided strategic leadership for one of the most successful laboratory systems development programmes of the US CDC. Dr Tebeje worked as assistant lecturer, lecturer and later as assistant professor at Gondar College of Medical Science, University of Gondar. He was recognized several times for his outstanding contributions, including the Mission Honor Award, Meritorious Honor Award and US CDC Center for Global Health Director’s Award. He has written lecture notes on microbiology, immunology and parasitology and authored and co-authored more than 30 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Dr Tebeje holds a Doctor of Medicine degree from Gondar College of Medical Sciences, a master’s degree in medical microbiology from Addis Ababa University, and a Master of Public Health degree from the University of Gondar.

Natalia Pshenichnaya

Natalia Pshenichnaya graduated from medical university in 1991 and finished her internship in infectious diseases in 1993. In 1996, she received her Ph.D. In 2006, she received her D.Sci. in infectious diseases, and in 2011, she became a diploma Professor in infectious diseases. From 1996 to 2019, Natalia worked as an assistant professor, associate Professor Professor, and head of the Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology department at the Rostov State Medical University. From 2011 to 2012, she acted as the WHO project officer for "Climate Change and Health" in WHO CO in Russia. From 2019 to 2020, she worked at the National Medical Research Center of Phthisiopulmonology and Infectious Diseases as the Head of the International Department in Moscow, Russia.

Since June 2020, she has been working as Deputy Director of the clinic and analytic work at the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology of The Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor) in Moscow, Russia. She is also a Professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases at Moscow Regional Research Clinical Institute and an infectious diseases consultant at the Infectious Diseases Hospital #2 in Moscow.

Since 2004, she has been a ProMED-mail RUS moderator for the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Since 2007, she has been involved in WHO activity as a short-term consultant (Influenza, Severe Acute Respiratory Infections, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, IHR, IPC, COVID-19). Since 2017, she has acted as Associate Editor of the Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials and since 2019 - a Russian Academy of Science expert. Natalia was a member of the WHO-China joint technical mission to China to support response operation for the COVID-19 outbreak February 2020, Russian military-medical humanitarian mission on COVID-19 in Bergamo (Lombardia province), Italy, 22 March-10 April 2020; WHO GOARN technical and assessment mission on COVID-19 and WHO IPC and clinical management mission on COVID-19 in Tajikistan (May-September 2020), Rospotrebnadzor technical and consultative missions on COVID-19 in Kyrgyzstan (July and August 2020), South Africa (December 2021), typhoid fever in Republic of Congo (August, 2023).

Natalia's areas of scientific interest are influenza and other acute respiratory infections, Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever, West Nile Fever, other zoonotic diseases, acute diarrhea, infectious diseases in travelers, viral hepatitis, etc.

Alison Holmes

Alison has a longstanding clinical and research career in global infectious diseases, with particular interests in antibiotic use, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), epidemiology, and public health within healthcare and has served on the Executive Committee of the ISID, chairing the Education and the Publications Committee and introducing the Emerging Leaders initiative. She is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College, a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences, and a National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigator. Professor Holmes leads a large multidisciplinary research group and network with solid international collaborations. She is the Director of the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Healthcare Associated Infections (HCAI) and AMR and the Centre of Antimicrobial Optimisation at Imperial College. She is an Associate Medical Director in the National Health Service, leading a multi-professional service, and a senior ID consultant.

In addition to her work in infectious diseases, she has served as a medical advisor to VSO, UK, and was involved in refugee health, health, and human rights. She was an expert member of the Governmental Advisory Committee on AMR and HCAI for nine years. Professor Holmes now chairs the Technical Advisory Group for the Fleming Fund. She sits on various WHO expert groups and committees and sits on or chairs numerous national and international scientific advisory boards, funding panels, and editorial boards.

Alison spent much of her life overseas. She attended Cambridge University as an undergraduate and then went to St George’s Medical School in London. She worked in communicable diseases and tropical medicine in Oxford, gained her DTM&H from London, and was awarded an ID fellowship to spend at Boston University, where her research was conducted in the Maxwell Finland Laboratories and where she gained an MPH in International Health from Harvard School of Public Health. Professor Holmes serves on the Finance Committee and the Nomination and Remuneration Committee.