Verana Hackathon 2022 Inspires Creativity and Collaboration Across Teams

This quarter, Verana Health proudly hosted Hackathon 2022, a recurring employee event to inspire creativity and collaboration across teams while reinforcing the company’s culture of innovation. 

Verana Health team members across the nation participated in the two-day virtual event, which was designed to generate new product ideas, discover ideas for efficiency improvements, and improve cross-functional team collaboration. 

The Hackathon event was organized around the following three themes:

• Improve patient care: Can we leverage our products to help advance patient care?
• Make it better: Can we find ways to improve processes, tools, and services?
• Scale the business: Can we build new processes and tools to enable our teams to scale with our business?

Thirteen teams and more than 100 employees took part in the event, with each team delivering a 10-minute presentation of its concept to a panel of six judges from Verana Health’s leadership team. Judges evaluated Hackathon teams based on a variety of factors including: effectiveness of the proposed solution, logistical and technical feasibility, likelihood of adoption, and creativity and engagement of presentation. 

The Hackathon event showcased the depth, breadth, and intellectual firepower of our diverse team of innovative thinkers.Sujay Jadhav

“The Hackathon event showcased the depth, breadth, and intellectual firepower of our diverse team of innovative thinkers,” said CEO Sujay Jadhav. “I was impressed by the cross-section of new ideas and solutions that  possess true potential to create new opportunities and drive operational and technological efficiencies. The Hackathon is an important event that allows our employees to dedicate time to think outside the box. It also provides an invaluable opportunity to conceive new ways to advance our business and the impact we make on healthcare. I would like to sincerely thank all the Verana Health team members who dedicated their time and effort to participating.”

The winner of Hackathon 2022 was Team RAMBO, which stands for Remote Agent Managed Business Objective (Andrew Valesky, Bina Patel, Devin Harris, Kyle Kirkpatrick, Robert Barks, Sri Pujitha, Tristan Hyams). The team’s project focused on automating several tasks performed by Verana Health’s proprietary remote agent technology.

Placing second was Team VeraViz (Aishwarya Ramakrishnan, Carlos Candano, Diana Glozman, Durga Borkar, Gabe Goldfeder, Ipsita Chitre, Kari Goodman, Ketki Khapare, Lisa Kechijian, Sonya Li, Zhongdi Chu). The team developed a plan to build an image-powered patient-screening tool into Verana Trial Connect.

According to Team VeraViz member Zhongdi Chu, “Our team had the ability to dream big as well as stretch our resources to make it happen on a proof-of-concept level within the time frame of the Hackathon. It was also a really fun experience hunting down people from different teams with different skill sets and persuading them to join our team, then to organize everyone’s unique talent to build our proposed product demo.” Chu also shared, “The most exciting moment was when our image-based diagnosis deep learning model demo worked! We all felt refreshed and reinvigorated afterward. It was also incredibly fun listening to the presentations and watching the demos from other teams in the company!”

Team VeraViz was also the Audience Choice Award winner and Team RAMBO was honored with the coveted Best Giphy Award..

Verana Health’s Hackathon event was a great success. It inspired innovation and enabled cross-team collaboration from several competencies across the company. It was rewarding to see how passionate many participants were about their projects. Some had been wanting to share these ideas, and they felt this was the perfect opportunity to gain visibility and to bring these ideas to fruition with the help and expertise of their colleagues. Many of the ideas presented will become embedded in our product roadmap. 

Moving forward, we hope that the spirit of the Hackathon contributes to our every-day culture of innovation, inspiring team members to continue to pursue their passions with creativity, determination, and ingenuity.