SIIM Hackathon

Topology Health was at the 2023 annual SIIM Hackathon! Supported by the College of American Pathologists, we collaborated with experts, innovators, and healthcare enthusiasts from the SIIM community to address challenges within the medical imaging industry. This annual hackathon serves as a platform for driving advancements and promoting collaboration within the healthcare industry. Our team’s project focused on enhancing data consolidation for radiologists and pathologists attending tumor board meetings. By streamlining the process, we aimed to save time, reduce the space for error, and ultimately contribute to better patient care.

Our Audience

Our solution targets the problems faced by radiologists, pathologists, oncologists, and healthcare professionals involved in tumor board meetings. These individuals play a crucial role in analyzing cancer findings and making recommendations for individual patients.

The Problem

Tumor board meetings typically involve a manual process of sifting through emails and communications to gather relevant patient data prior to the meeting. This repetitive process not only consumes valuable time but also leaves open the possibility of missing crucial information. We recognized the potential for automation here and set out to create such a workflow.

Leveraging Our Tools

To develop our solution, we utilized a combination of internal and open-source tools, which includes our SMARTerOnFHIR library that also powers our upcoming workflow app. By leveraging this library, we were able to rapidly integrate with electronic medical record (EMR) systems, allowing us to focus on development of the tumor board dashboard. Additionally, we utilized an internal Clinical Quality Language (CQL) Expression Layer Model (ELM) execution engine to provide rudimentary clinical decision support, which we will have more to share about at a future date.

Final Results

We secured a 3rd place finish in the SIIM Hackathon. We were up alongside very exceptional projects, which highlights the significance of the problem we tackled. Our solution’s ability to streamline data consolidation, automate patient information gathering, and facilitate efficient tumor board meetings provided a glimpse into the future of cancer care.

Topology Health’s success in the SIIM Hackathon underscores our commitment to advancing healthcare technology. By leveraging our tools and expertise, we created a solution that simplifies tumor board meetings and enhances the decision-making process for radiologists. Our dashboard solution, aptly named “Tumor Board on FHIR,” showcases our ability to harness the power of automation and connectivity to drive progress in the medical imaging industry.

We had a great time participating at the SIIM Hackathon and will definitely be back again. The participants and supporting team are absolutely fantastic and we encourage anyone interested in medical imaging to check it out!