The Challenge

Globally, healthcare services need reliable information systems that can talk to each other. Biomedical research needs large high-quality data sets. Information standards and data interoperability are crucial to achieve both of these aims. Industry is looking for people with the skills to deliver this. This competition will help students gain those skills.

HL7® is the leading global authority on standards for interoperability of health information systems. The latest HL7 standard is called FHIR® (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, pronounced “fire”). FHIR has been widely adopted by industry and healthcare provider organisations, including NHS Digital. This competition will take place in an online hack day on 10 December 2020. The challenge is to develop a demonstrator solution using artefacts from the FHIR Clinical Reasoning module for a specified clinical use case, based on an open source FHIR server.

The Teams

The competition is open to home/EU or international students at UK universities who are enrolled on an undergraduate computing course (any year, any degree within a computing or software engineering department) or a health informatics Master’s degree. We require students to form groups of three (not more or less) to participate. For students seeking additional collaborators, we will help to facilitate “match-making”. We encourage multi-institutional collaboration involving 2-3 universities, but this is not a requirement. One student from a non-UK university may be included if they otherwise meet the criteria. Teams must report in their final submission how they have applied equality and diversity principles in their formation and performance.

The Prize

The prize for the winning team will be £1000 per student plus free online attendance at FHIR DevDays 2021 run by Fire.ly. DevDays is an outstanding opportunity to develop, learn, network and explore opportunities with the world’s leading FHIR specialists. This is a marvellous chance for computer science and software engineering students who want to acquire new skills and demonstrate competitive success in an exciting field. Excellent for the CV!

The sponsors are InterSystems and the computational platform is kindly provided by AWS Educate.

How to Apply

  • Applications open: 12 October 2020
  • Application deadline: 2300 GMT, 10 November 2020
  • Accepted teams notified: 13 November 2020
  • Teams study hack day tutorials and complete preliminary work: 13 November – 9 December 2020
  • Hack day and awards ceremony (online): 10 December 2020

To apply or raise any questions, please complete this form.

Sponsored by