Hackathon

4 Reasons Why DethWench’s App Did Not Win MassHack 2014

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Red Crystal

erREFORM helps patients and public health push emergency rooms to medicate pain ethically. Icon from Wikimedia Commons (in the public domain).

The app erREFORM contributed by my company, DethWench Professional Services, the only socially responsible public health consulting organization, did not win for a few reasons that one can discern by looking at the judges’ comments on the project page, as well as some fundamental aspects of both the objective of the app and the current app development environment.

  1. The myth that a working app is better than vaporware at the hackathon stage.  I presented for our team, and I presented vaporware that would be based on kludging together ideas from several other existing apps.  Why is that better than a working app from an investment standpoint?  It suggests a better project management life cycle.  If developers at the hackathon get married to a weekend kludge, and this kluge continues to evolve until you are fully funded, it’s very expensive to rebuild.  To build erREFORM, I’d take a lesson out of what an earlier presenter said about engaging employees and work with whatever developers I get to build out the app in their way, so they can participate in the technological design.
  2. The myth that the hackathon community represents the app customers.  Since most the people participating and all of the people judging were men, there is a misunderstanding of a good portion of the customer base, since women do a lot of purchasing and using of apps.  erREFORM helps patients track their pain relief in the ER using a smartphone app so that these data can be sent to public health professionals who can bitch to Congress about it, like Kaiser Foundation, and hopefully, American Public Health Association.  Since women are higher utilizers of health care, and are often caregivers to people in pain, this may not be on men’s radar.  Also, since most nurses are women and most engineers and rich business people are men, you can see where this great divide is socialcultural, not biological.
  3. The myth of the “business models” in US health care.  I see all kinds of business people who have never worked in US health care, even as business people, make all kinds of rational assumptions that will go nowhere.  First, clinical research has an ROI, and that ROI is from getting in bed with industry, as Big Pharma economically cheers on its academically-tenured minions through milking STTRs and SBIRs.  In US health care, apps are just like drugs.  Having a successful healthcare app has little to do with traditional ideas of adoption, innovation, and leaping across the “valley of death”.  Purdue Pharmaceuticals makes money because oxycontin is addictive and it’s easy to get from the US health care system and abuse.  This is not a business model.  Again, if you include a few women, you might get a nurse among the crowd, and she’ll help you with a US health care app’s ROI.  She’s the one wading through drug, medical device, and now tech reps to get to her patient.
  4. The current awkwardness of coupling apps, especially health care apps, to patient activism.  Even Dr. Cal’s project Patient TalkBack needs some work, in my opinion.  Like with the Capsules.io guys, Dr. Cal’s video doesn’t really show what it’s about.  But when I demo’ed it at the hackathon myself, I tried to point out that it does not give an easy forum to what patients want to say.  Patients want to say, “I waited for 2 extra hours after being brought back before getting pain meds in the ER!”  I know this – I’m a patient, I study patients, and I ask nurses what patients say, since they are the ones who interact with patients more than anyone else.  Right now, with innovators creating health care apps mainly for the stated purpose “saving money for Big Health Care” which patients hate anyway, we app-developers are missing an opportunity to be to US health care delivery what Facebook and Twitter were to the Arab Spring – a platform for activism.

Why should you listen to me? I have experience actually making and testing health care apps. My best friend Bob and I developed a health care app on the Palm Pilot in the early 2000s and published on it in 2007 – check it out here!