On Wednesday 14th and 15th February in Liverpool we hosted our very first Hackathon at System C.

A Hackathon is an event where people engage in a collaborative engineering initiative over a brief period, typically between 24 and 48 hours. The event starts with a brief of the key objectives, as well as the specific details of the Hackathon. At the end of the Hackathon a series of demonstrations takes place where each group who took part shares and presents their results to the wider team. This allows people to share their ideas and processes to help develop future ideas.

Focus on AI in Healthcare

This time our Hackathon focused on our healthcare division, and we saw around fifteen members of our Research and Development Team and ten people from Microsoft taking part.

Hackathons tend to have a specific focus, on this occasion the group investigated how we can better use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our solutions in order to benefit our customers, and also to help speed up our own internal development processes.

During this time, the teams worked on building creative solutions for user cases provided by our product management teams here at System C. The user cases were a mixture of feedback from customers as well as looking at industry trends.

Participants utilised a mix of Azure services which included the GPT-4 model in Azure Open AI, Natural Language Processing (NLPs), Speech-to-Text recognition as well as Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Developing AI-Driven Solutions

The Hackathon lasted 48 hours and the teams used this time to focus to ensure that they quickly got up to speed. This productive session allowed the teams to develop unique solutions involving AI, this is an incredible feat as if done normally this process could take weeks if not months.

The participants broke out into two separate teams with the mutual aim of developing small proof-of-concepts which infused artificial intelligence into System C’s EPR products. These developments have the potential to help transform clinician’s experiences and ultimately help to improve patient care.

Hackathon projects are also great for increasing professional creativity and can also show self-expression as participants will be able to use the most innovative and modern technological solutions which are readily available.

System C and Microsoft's Vision

Brian Collins, CTO, System C commented: “Our Healthcare hackathon gave our teams a chance to unplug and get our hands dirty with Microsoft’s AI capability. The teams achieved a huge amount over a couple of days which will no doubt lead to very exciting new product features in the future." 

The AI Hackathon marks the continuation of a long-term partnership between System C and Microsoft. By working together, we can start to bring transformational AI to our products with the goal of saving clinicians and patients time, increasing accuracy, and leveraging insights from conversations to improve experiences, pathways and potentially even treatment options.

Gerain Lewis, Director of Population Health, Microsoft said "What do you get when you put a group of Microsoft and System C engineers together in a hackathon on Valentine's day? A whole lot of love for AI and healthcare innovation! I was lucky enough to be part of this exciting event in Liverpool on 14-15 February, some brilliant minds from both companies teamed up to create innovative prototypes. It was fantastic to see the enthusiasm and commitment from System C's leadership, which really set the tone for the entire event. Our team focused on using ambient technology to assist doctors who are working out-of-hours. We used Azure OpenAI, natural language processing, and Speech-to-Text to generate a first draft of the clinical note for the doctor to review. It was incredible to see how fast and easy the engineers found it to code with GitHub Copilot. We had so much fun working together with hands on keyboards. I was amazed by the results achieved in such a short space of time and can't wait to see what the finished product will look like. This event really built on the deep partnership between Microsoft and System C and I can't wait to see how these new capabilities evolve across the System C portfolio.”

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