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Over 100 attendees participated in the weekend-long event, where a 3-day hackathon launched 7 new startups competing for 40,000 EG cash prizes. Here's the winners.
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.
“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.
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