As a health IT company, we are constantly straddling the two distinct worlds of healthcare and technology. While our objective is to develop new and improved communication and collaboration methods, the barometer of our success has always been empowering clinicians in order to improve patient outcomes—and we consider ourselves masters in bridging these two worlds.

Ultimately, we know we’re successful when we’re flying under the radar, optimizing workflows seamlessly and behind the scenes.

Mobile Heartbeat and HIT

That’s why National Health IT Week is one of our favorite times of year—this September 23-27, we have the opportunity to celebrate the strides we’ve made, both internally and with partners and customers. We get to show off some of the features we’re most proud of, and provide a peek into the way we develop those features.

National Health IT Week began in 2006 as a way of recognizing and catalyzing positive change in our healthcare system through information technology. According to HIMSS, one of the founding bodies, the goal is to “collaborate toward actionable outcomes that demonstrate the power that information and technology have to transform health in the U.S. and around the globe.”

We’ll be celebrating National Health IT Week with our second annual hackathon.

Hacking Health IT Week

A hackathon is an event where people pitch any number of ideas they’re passionate about, whether it’s product enhancements that don’t make it into the official roadmap, process improvement or even creative pet projects. After the ideas are pitched, employees sign up to participate on a team in order to have a deliverable project at the end of 12 hours. Last year we hosted our first ever hackathon, and we saw some incredible ideas reach fruition in just one day.

“That was a day that you walked in to work as usual, but the day was completely different. You worked with different people, had a different kind of ownership over your work. That’s the best thing about the hackathon,” said Mobile Heartbeat CTO, Saji Aravind. “The entrepreneur in every person comes out.”

This year we’re starting fresh with 13 big ideas, and on September 26, we’ll get to work bringing those ideas to life. From 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., you can find the employees at Mobile Heartbeat leveraging their considerable brain power to solving brand new problems and creating something out of nothing.

“With technology, you can’t be stagnant,” said Brian McKee, an engineering manager at Mobile Heartbeat. “This is a way to take all of our ideas we have and make something new and great from them.”

Health IT as an Industry With Firsthand Experience

This philosophy of forward movement and innovation is not the only pervasive message of the hackathon.

“If you think about where we came from and what we are, the startup of a technology company already is a hackathon,” Mobile Heartbeat CEO, Ron Remy, said. “My hope is that we keep that culture and that DNA moving forward. I don’t know if that’s prevalent at other health IT companies, but it’s certainly prevalent here.”

While other technology companies—big names like Facebook and Microsoft—make good use of hackathons, the Mobile Heartbeat hackathon stands out in one spectacular way.

“Every one of us has experience with the healthcare industry, and we all want to make it better,” Aravind said. “These ideas aren’t just dreamed up in the shower, they come from personal experience. That sets us apart from hackathons in other industries.”

It also sets the health IT industry apart in a meaningful way. Health IT employees, both at Mobile Heartbeat and elsewhere, have their own experiences with healthcare, and ultimately we are all working in this industry to improve upon the existing processes and workflows to provide a better experience—for the entire healthcare community.