As part of our Digital Health Partnership (DHP), we host annual hackathon events around our workshops – this year is no exception. Fifteen PhD, Master and Bachelor students paired up in teams of two for a total of seven teams to compete against each other and the clock in a full two-day event before our Digital Health Partnership Workshop 2025 in Potsdam hosted on the campus of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering (HPI), working on AI-based solutions using de-identified electronic health data from the Mount Sinai Health System (MS) provided via the AI-Ready Mount Sinai (AIR·MS) platform. Some of the topics included investigating late diagnosis of endometriosis, MRSA-risk modelling using Lasso, crafting a patient drug adherence app, mapping health insights across New York, exploring the full spectrum of the patient journey and creating a dashboard for the patient journey. At the end of this challenging event, the teams had to present their projects to the other competitors and a jury.
“We were offered so much support with the setup before and during the event. The organizers encouraged us to keep going despite the difficulties we faced in our chosen challenge, and they were always ready to help us,“ reported Basant Elmahmoudy and Dyhia Hamdi, both Master students in the Digital Health Cluster at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering and first-time hackathon participants. “We learned a lot.”
All teams did a fantastic job in such a short amount of time, and we are grateful to all participants for the dedication and passion they brought to this event. The winners were Grit Fessel and Marleen Streicher, team “GritMarleen”, with their project: “Hypochondriasis – Leveraging Machine Learning for Improved Diagnostics”. Congratulations to this year’s winners!
“A nice atmosphere, the chance to work with real patient data and the opportunity for coming up with your own idea made this event a truly positive and valuable experience” – Grit and Marleen, DHP Hackathon Potsdam 2025 winners.
This DHP Hackathon was made possible thanks to our partners and friends at the Mount Sinai Health System and Data4Life. A special thank you goes to Lewis Lo (MS), Anurag Patil (MS), Eugenia Alleva (MS), Akhyar Ahmed (HPI), Aadil Rasheed (HPI), Elmien Heyneke (HPI), David Wuttke (HPI), Jonas Ebener (HPI), for organizing, running and supporting this event.
We plan to offer more great learning opportunities such as this for young researchers to work on real world clinical data and we are excited to see which projects will come together out of our future events!
