Over the weekend of April 3-5, Teradata participated in the
MIT COVID Challenge Hackathon, which intended to design approaches and mentor teams focused on stamping out the pandemic. Each team included a wide variety of contributors: medical students, innovation leads of health centers, UX designers, biomedical engineers, data scientists and clinical advisors.
Teradata employees supported the effort as mentors and participants to move solution development forward. Key questions that the group worked to answer included:
How to support hospitals with shortage of staff, supplies, and resources?
- Identifying the COVID-19 Immune
- New ways to deliver care in a COVID-19 World
- Hospital Assets Coordination, and Distribution
- Space conversion and utility
- Health care workforce well-being, management, training
How to protect vulnerable populations from the effects of COVID-19?
- Expanding and improving access to COVID-19 education and resources
- Who to test and when?
- At-Home Patient Triaging
- COVID-19 Treatment and Management
- Impact of Social Distancing and Quarantines
Work-in-Progress
One of the teams, named “Community Care,” focused on developing a platform that connects the needs of elders to younger, tech-enabled volunteers. The team will leverage common technology used by seniors today, such as Facebook user groups and IVR surveying, to connect to both volunteers and registered caregivers for resourcing. The goal: reduce complexity and time required when urgent help is needed.
Another team was focused on modeling test data to help ensure that the most vulnerable people are prioritized to receive a COVID-19 test – crucial work, given the limitation of test kits is likely to continue. The effort is focused on establishing the proper platform for provider systems to register data securely, and then connect that information to requests for testing using the most up-to-date data. This would address symptomatic and asymptomatic modeling issues, which are currently at an early phase of availability. This group is looking to overcome the current models, which are focused only on general surveys to collect symptoms - an approach which will be challenging to scale quickly.
This is just a sampling of the great work done at this hackathon and our thanks go out to MIT for hosting. As these teams continue to roll out their solutions, Teradata is committed to volunteering our services as part of our Teradata Cares program to drive assistance for humanitarian efforts globally.
Mr. Ulatowski, an epidemiologist formerly of the Department of Health Science Research at Mayo Clinic, focuses on applying analytic techniques for a variety of client strategic initiatives, primarily centered on patient and member insight programs for healthcare and life science organizations. His accomplishments include leading the design of quality outcomes programs for two accountable care organizations, genetic engineering and research in therapy design for treatment of West Nile virus, and implementing a human factors engineering program assessing adoption of digital technology across health centers supporting underserved patients for a large west coast provider organization. His current initiatives focus on merging statistical analysis of both the social science and clinical data. Educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his interests include understanding the impacts of human behavior on both epidemiologic studies and health policy.
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