The Health Innovations Conference

The Annual Health Innovations Conference, now in its third year, was born of a need to create collaborations and partnerships around health. Hosted by The Ugandan Academy for Health Innovation, at the Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI), the conference seeks to harness new, emerging and all capable technologies to improve the quality and access to healthcare in Uganda and the region at large. The theme for this year’s conference is “Collaborating to transform”.

About Frontline Health

Recent urbanization, globalization, increased human populations and mobility, coupled with environmental changes have significantly facilitated migration of diseases vectors to areas they had never been registered. This has led to exponential rise in animal-to-human (zoonotic) diseases like the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and Congo which have claimed thousands of lives and still poses challenges to the health sector.

Significant successes to combating these epidemics are due to the tireless and fearless effort of the Frontline Healthcare workers. “Frontline health workers are trusted, knowledgeable health personnel, who belong to the communities they serve. They are well accepted and relied on by the communities and form the central pillar of effective health systems key to reducing preventable deaths and achieving universal health coverage. They are the foundation of disease intelligence essential to efforts to eliminate diseases and prevent disease outbreak. However, against such important roles and proven cost effectiveness in achieving health outcomes, they are among the most neglected cadre of health workforce in Africa and other parts of the world. They are poorly equipped and remain exposed to disease risks, and except in few countries, receive inadequate training, lack supervision and career development.”

How might we leverage technology in Global Health Security?

This hackathon will challenge innovators to build solutions to support the Frontline Healthcare workers in the aspects of:

• Disease surveillance via social media and internet postings, optimized for local languages
• Networked applications to facilitate contact tracing plus automated report generation
• Electronic medical records for outbreaks
• Innovations to support real-time tracking of biological samples during sample transportation
• Affordable point-of-care diagnostics for outbreaks

Who should apply?
We are looking for promising Ugandan innovators that can develop solutions aligned to the following challenge theme areas:

• Disease surveillance
• Contact tracing
• Outbreak reporting
• Biological sample tracking
• Point-of-care diagnostics

Why Join the Hackathon?

• Tailored Mentorship: Selected local mentors from the health sector (Infectious Disease Institute) and IT industry (Andela and The Innovation Village) to provide hands on support.
• Access to Investors: Access to investors at the roundtable discussion during the Health Innovation Conference.
• Funding: Winning Technology Solutions will receive support from Ministry of ICT’s National ICT Initiative Support Program Fund.

The Process

Application Open	February 17th 2020
Application Deadline	March 16th 2020
Selection	March 18th 2020 – March 19th 2020
Hackathon	March 27th to 28th 2020 at the Innovation Village Ntinda

Click here to participate