Two weeks ago, I had decided to join a hackathon sponsored by the company I’m interning at this summer, Cerner. It was a hackathon for interns and apprentices, and this will be the my first hackathon ever. It was a whole week long so it won’t interfere with our actual work. At least, that was the intention. 😝

Our team chose to work on a healthcare analytics app. It was an idea pitched by one of my teammates and we all liked the idea, especially since Cerner deals with healthcare IT and we can receive bonus points for using any of their open-sourced libraries. So, what is this app we built and what does it do?

We live in a technological world with everything - EVERYTHING - available on the internet. Twitter is one of the most popular platform where people will go to share, rant, whine about anything and everything. Imagine if we could use all that available data to predict patterns in flu or allergy outbreaks! Combining the Twitter API with some D3 magic (seriously, UI work is magical work), we were able to scrape health-related data from various tweets to create a descriptive healthcare analytics app.

It was really challenging but we had fun with the project. We ended up winning third place! Not too shabby for my first hackathon. 🙃 I also had really great teammates. They hacked hard. 💪 Check out our presentation here.