Cairo's First Health Hack Took Off, and Here's 7 New Egyptian Health Tech Startups to Watch

Last weekend, at the freshly launched KMT House co-working space, Cairo's first-ever Health Hack took off, bringing together over 100 attendees for panel discussions, presentations, brand new technology showcases and a 3-day intensive hackathon for 40,000 EG cash prizes.

Organised by Health 2.0 Cairo, an organization dedicated to revolutionising healthcare tech in the Arab world's most populous nation, the event marked Egypt’s first hackathon dedicated to creating digital and software solutions for healthcare needs. The event also gathered several supporting entities, from Start Egypt, to Smart Medical Services, Sanofi Egypt, Fruit Street (US based diabetes telehealth company) and HIMSS (The world’s largest Healthcare Information Technology Conference). “The Health 2.0 Cairo Hackathon was effective in highlighting the benefits of bringing talented entrepreneurs together to tackle some of the real challenges in healthcare today. We were very proud to be part of this initiative that supports great entrepreneurial minds working on developing a better future for Egypt,” said Raguia Amr, Program Manager StartEgypt.

From telemedicine and remote patient monitoring and machine learning, the latest technologies and APIs from Silicon Valley were showcased and utilised by developers in the competition, while the panel discussion brought insight into the trending world of healthcare tech and its viable uses in the Egyptian healthcare system.

The first topic around designing solutions that improve access to care hosted thought leaders in the healthcare industry, including Amr el Tayeb, CEO of  Smart Medical Services and Dr. Ahmed Abdelatti, Managing Director of El Gouna hospital. More healthcare tech talk ensued with the second topic of the evening on designing technologies that improve chronic disease outcomes. The panel included Choucri Asmar of AXA Egypt, said Hassan Shaker, Managing Director of Cairo Specialized Hospitals and Rania Kadry, CTO of Almouneer.

“I was impressed strong data presentations from the teams that worked on the data challenge and the robust business cases created in just 2 days. Also, Health on the Go, Consulto and Alf Salama teams showed promise with a dedicated team, strong cohesive backgrounds and a great solution with social impact. This is what hackathons are all about," says Karim Hussein, Managing Partner of Algebra Ventures.

• Serious About Data, a statistical model to reduce claim inefficiencies, give a score for provider and services to number of patients according to its level of suspiciousness was awarded the first Prize of 30,000 EGP.
  
  
• Team In Control, software for hospitals that scans all medical reports, extracts and visualizes its data in one dashboard for accurate and ultra-fast decision making with video conferencing for remote medical consultation, was given the second Prize, of 10,000 EGP.

• Fraud or Not, uses data mining of CMS for Medicare & Medicaid services, providing insights, cleaning up datasets, performing feature extraction and applying unsupervised machine learning techniques to cluster the dataset to determine fraudulent insurance claims. They were awarded the 3rd Prize Team 1. 
  
  
• Fraud Detector, automated process for flagging wasteful/fraudulent medical insurance claims and identify the source whether from the provider or patient. They were awarded 3rd Prize Team 2. 
  
  
• Team Alf Salama, a facebook add on that allows early detection of chronic diseases, was a finalist at the AUC Vlabs Incubator Final Panel. 
  
  
• PKU, a device for real-time monitoring of Phenylketonuria (PKU) children patients non-invasively. The device is connected to a mobile app for the parents of the patients that collects measurement data continuously and recommends specialized diets based on these measurements. AUC Vlabs Business Bootcamp.
  
  
• Health on the Go, chronic heart disease follow up program with the patient through devices like iHealth. Doctors can analyze the results with risk assessment model and notify patients who are at risk and add recommendations. They won Highest Social Impact Potential, getting Free Tickets to SkaleupVentures' Vested Summit in El Gouna. 

“We are very excited to support this movement as Sanofi Egypt focuses on innovation for a healthier population in both Egypt and Africa. We are looking forward to a long term collaboration with these budding innovators.” said Sanofi Egypt's Khaled Abdelshaheed. The winning teams plan to further develop their hackathon concepts through mentorship and guidance from the Health 2.0 Cairo to ideation and proof of concept. This is just the beginning for these innovative teams.