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The Datavant Guide to Hosting a Company Hackathon

Datavant

June 3, 2022

At Datavant, we host a company-wide hackathon called Datavant Create. We are a remote-first team, so this is an opportunity to periodically bring everyone together in one place. This post outlines why we invest in this tradition, and shares our playbook for running a hackathon.

Why we do Datavant Create

Our hackathon is a place for everyone on the team to work on ideas they believe the company should be pursuing. We want engineering teams to prototype new product ideas and build internal tooling, operations teams to design & implement new processes, and marketing teams to sketch out bold ideas for new campaigns. A truly great hackathon project is one that changes our minds. It doesn’t merely take an idea that is already obvious to everyone and implement it; instead, it takes a new concept and builds it out to convince the team it is more valuable, more timely, or more practical than we previously thought. A number of internal tools and product features have started out as hackathon projects — including an internal tool for our team to better serve customers, our employee pulse survey, and a new product feature to analyze overlap in multiple datasets.

Early in the pandemic, we decided to become a remote-first team. So we chose to have the hackathon take on another important role: building in-person connections on the team. I love feeling the energy in the room as hackathon teams huddle around laptops, and excitedly demo prototypes they hacked together in just a couple days. Of course, it’s not just hacking — we also make time for a fun event, a team dinner, or a company all-hands meeting.

Our playbook for running Datavant Create

We have two workstreams, each captained by different people: (1) running the event itself, from lodging & venue logistics to catering to covid testing, and (2) running the hackathon, from curating ideas, to forming teams, to picking the winners.

Running the event

We’ve grown rapidly since our founding in 2017, and now have a couple hundred people attending company-wide hackathons. Planning a multi-day event for a group this large is a demanding job! Plan for this to take dozens of hours over multiple weeks. Our hackathon is typically a 3-day event (including travel), with 2+ days dedicated to the hackathon itself, capped by a two-hour session with demos & awards.

We usually start planning 8–12 weeks before the event by choosing the dates, identifying a target city or region, and then finding a venue for the hackathon. We often choose a large hotel with conference space to host the hackathon, allowing us to have a single vendor for event space, lodging, and catering. We like to have a single, large open room that can hold everyone. As soon as we confirm the venue, we send a save-the-date to the team.

If you’re looking to lighten the planning load you can use a service like TeamOut or Flok to streamline venue selection & contracting, or go even further and engage an event management agency. Generally, companies spend $1500 to $2500 per employee for a team event like this, depending on the type of venue & how far employees are traveling.

We’re a large group and want to gather safely, so we ask everyone to produce a negative covid test before traveling to the event. We use MediKeeper to make this easy & secure.

Running the hackathon at the event

Now that we‘ve worked out the logistics, it’s time to hack!

We typically have two or three participants from past versions of Datavant Create volunteer to organize the next hackathon. While this can be less involved than the event planning work, it still requires several hours of dedicated effort in the weeks leading up to the hackathon.

Starting a few weeks before the hackathon, the organizing group helps build excitement for the event. They start a steady stream of communications to the company, sharing logistics, how to participate, highlighting past projects, and creating a forum for pitching ideas & forming teams. We often choose a theme for the hackathon to inspire certain types of projects — we’ve had a hackathon focused on providers & health systems, and another looking inward at team spirit & belonging. And we always welcome projects outside the theme as well.

Two weeks before the hackathon, we open up a tool for sharing & discussing project ideas — this can be as simple as a shared Google doc. Then, a week before the event, we host a live (virtual) event where people can pitch ideas & sign up for teams. We encourage participants to self-organize into teams (encouraging cross functional teams as much as possible), though the organizers can also match folks to teams if requested. After this event, we take our first census to record the participants on each team.

Once the big day is here, the organizers kick things off. For the next two days, teams are building on their own, with minimal scheduled programming apart from meals. The day before the demos, we ask each team to sign up for a demo spot if their project will be ready. Not every group that signed up makes it to the demos successfully. And that’s okay! We want teams to pursue bold ideas — not all of them will work out.

The organizers also select a judging panel to choose the best projects. The judging panel is a great way to get people beyond the hackathon teams excited about the hackathon. In the past, we’ve picked leaders from across the company to be judges. They provide valuable perspectives to the judging panel, and generate interest from across the organization. We also choose a popular winner based on a real-time audience poll.

After you’ve announced the winners (and given prizes, if you choose), it’s time to wrap up the hackathon on a high note. Take a moment to reflect on the excitement in the room, and the creative projects that your team has built!

That’s it

We wish you best of luck in running your own hackathon. Of course, you’re welcome to join our next hackathon too! We’re hiring software engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers, product managers and much more.

Spotlight on AnalyticsIQ: Privacy Leadership in State De-Identification

AnalyticsIQ, a marketing data and analytics company, recently adopted Datavant’s state de-identification process to enhance the privacy of its SDOH datasets. By undergoing this privacy analysis prior to linking its data with other datasets, AnalyticsIQ has taken an extra step that could contribute to a more efficient Expert Determination (which is required when its data is linked with others in Datavant’s ecosystem).

AnalyticsIQ’s decision to adopt state de-identification standards underscores the importance of privacy in the data ecosystem. By addressing privacy challenges head-on, AnalyticsIQ and similar partners are poised to lead clinical research forward, providing datasets that are not only compliant with privacy requirements, but also ready for seamless integration into larger datasets.

"Stakeholders across the industry are seeking swift, secure access to high-quality, privacy-compliant SDOH data to drive efficiencies and improve patient outcomes,” says Christine Lee, head of health strategy and partnerships at AnalyticsIQ.

“By collaborating with Datavant to proactively perform state de-identification and Expert Determination on our consumer dataset, we help minimize potentially time-consuming steps upfront and enable partners to leverage actionable insights when they need them most. This approach underscores our commitment to supporting healthcare innovation while upholding the highest standards of privacy and compliance."

Building Trust in Privacy-Preserving Data Ecosystems

As the regulatory landscape continues to evolve, Datavant’s state de-identification product offers an innovative tool for privacy officers and data custodians alike. By addressing both state-specific and HIPAA requirements, companies can stay ahead of regulatory demands and build trust across data partners and end-users. For life sciences organizations, this can lead to faster, more reliable access to the datasets they need to drive research and innovation while supporting high privacy standards.

As life sciences companies increasingly rely on SDOH data to drive insights, the need for privacy-preserving solutions grows. Data ecosystems like Datavant’s, which link real-world datasets while safeguarding privacy, are critical to driving innovation in healthcare. By integrating state de-identified SDOH data, life sciences can gain a more comprehensive view of patient populations, uncover social factors that impact health outcomes, and ultimately guide clinical research that improves health.

The Power of SDOH Data with Providers and Payers to Close Gaps in Care

Both payers and providers are increasingly utilizing SDOH data to enhance care delivery and improve health equity. By incorporating SDOH data into their strategies, both groups aim to deliver more personalized care, address disparities, and better understand the social factors affecting patient outcomes.

Payers Deploy Targeted Care Using SDOH Data

Payers increasingly leverage SDOH data to meet health equity requirements and enhance care delivery:

Tailored Member Programs: Payers develop specialized initiatives like nutrition delivery services and transportation to and from medical appointments.
Identifying Care Gaps: SDOH data helps payers identify gaps in care for underserved communities, enabling strategic in-home assessments and interventions.
Future Risk Adjustment Models: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) plans to incorporate SDOH-related Z codes into risk adjustment models, recognizing the significance of SDOH data in assessing healthcare needs.

Payers’ consideration of SDOH underscores their commitment to improving health equity, delivering targeted care, and addressing disparities for vulnerable populations.

Example: CDPHP supports physical and mental wellbeing with non-medical assistance

Capital District Physicians’ Health Plan (CDPHP) incorporated SDOH, partnering with Papa, to combat loneliness and isolation in older adults, families, and other vulnerable populations. CDPHP aimed to address:

Social isolation
Loneliness
Transportation barriers
Gaps in care

By integrating SDOH data, CDPHP enhanced their services to deliver comprehensive care for its Medicare Advantage members.

Providers Optimize Value-Based Care Using SDOH Data

Value-based care organizations face challenges in fully understanding their patient panels. SDOH data significantly assists providers to address these challenges and improve patient care. Here are some examples of how:

Onboard Patients Into Care Programs: Providers use SDOH data to identify patients who require additional support and connect them with appropriate resources.
Stratify Patients by Risk: SDOH data combined with clinical information identifies high-risk patients, enabling targeted interventions and resource allocation.
Manage Transition of Care: SDOH data informs post-discharge plans, considering social factors to support smoother transitions and reduce readmissions.

By leveraging SDOH data, providers gain a more comprehensive understanding of their patient population, leading to more targeted and personalized care interventions.

While accessing SDOH data offers significant advantages, challenges can arise from:

Lack of Interoperability and Uniformity: Data exists in fragmented sources like electronic health records (EHRs), public health databases, social service systems, and proprietary databases. Integrating and securing data while ensuring data integrity and confidentiality can be complex, resource-intensive and risky.
Lag in Payer Claims Data: Payers can take weeks or months to release claims data. This delays informed decision-making, care improvement, analysis, and performance evaluation.
Incomplete Data Sets in Health Information Exchanges (HIEs): Not all healthcare providers or organizations participate in HIEs. This reduces the available data pool. Moreover, varying data sharing policies result in data gaps or inconsistencies.

To overcome these challenges, providers must have robust data integration strategies, standardization efforts, and access to health data ecosystems to ensure comprehensive and timely access to SDOH data.

SDOH data holds immense potential in transforming healthcare and addressing health disparities.

With Datavant, healthcare organizations are securely accessing SDOH data, and further enhancing the efficiency of their datasets through state de-identification capabilities - empowering stakeholders across the industry to make data-driven decisions that drive care forward.

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