MANDALUYONG, Philippines – The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia (SIL-Asia) mentored international participants at the ‘Asian Development Bank (ADB) – Asian Institute of Management (AIM) Hackathon: Hack the Health Solutions for Rural Areas in Asia’, hosted by Ultrahack, last 2-3 September 2018 at the ADB Headquarters, Philippines.

With SIL-Asia’s experience in digital health implementations, SIL-Asia was tasked to conceptualize the healthcare challenge that was posted for submission. The challenge was centered on designing and implementing a solution for personal health data sharing and patient journey in low-resource settings.

SIL-Asia’s technical lead, Philip Christian Zuniga, along with other international digital health mentors, guided the participants on how their solutions can better address the nature of the hackathon challenge.

The solutions were judged based on innovativeness, perceived benefits to users, individual and/or team talent, technical progression, and fit to challenge. ADB declared two winning teams: (1) Health ID 2.0, a health mobile application for low-resource settings; and (2) TeleHealth, a solution which uses QR (Quick Response) codes for patient data exchange.

The Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia is a regional health interoperability laboratory powered by the Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN) and supported by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) with sponsorship from The People’s Republic of China Poverty Reduction and Regional Cooperation Fund (PRC Fund).

The concept for the Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia was first conceived at the Regional Interoperability Workshop organized by AeHIN in Manila last August 2015 at the sidelines of the Global Health Research Forum. The regional lab was designed to serve as a template of labs in each country that will later form into the Community of Interoperability Labs (COIL).