Referral management certainly seems to be in the zeitgeist, as the two top-scoring apps both zeroed in on this pain point for dental and other practice types.
“Sikka’s single API helped us to build an interface to our platform seamlessly. This is a huge asset for us, to expand our network of acquiring customers through Sikka.”— Suneel Kandru, Medcohere
SANTA CLARA, CA, USA, November 19, 2020 — Sikka, the market leader in advancing retail healthcare connectivity, applications and insights, hereby announces the winners of its first-ever public API Hackathon, as judged by prominent current and former executives from within the healthcare (3M, Patterson, Henry Schein), tech (Google, Apple) and finance (Citigroup) industries:
First Prize: Medcohere, a referral and scheduling platform bridging the communication gap between dentists and specialists, thereby optimizing a process that has long been wildly inefficient, slow and manual. The Medcohere team was led by Massachusetts-based Suneel Kandru, a practicing endodontist who sits on the faculties of both the Harvard School of Dental Medicine and NYU Langone Medical Center, and also included Sankarsan Parida and Babu Rao.
Second Prize: Refera, an online management platform which allows dentists to send and track their specialist referrals to anyone. Southern California resident Kurt Gooding, a self-described coder, headed the Refera team, working with Dr. Hessam Ahani of the San Francisco Bay Area, thereby creating a truly Californian team.
Third Prize: SikkaRx, which monitors patients’ prescriptions – down to details around timing and dosages taken – using not only Sikka’s API but Apple’s HealthKit. The India-based team, which is not affiliated with Sikka in any way, was led by Vinayak Bipin Joshi.
Each winning team’s prize package includes both cash and an introductory license to Sikka’s API platform that will allow these compelling apps to quickly build their followings among the more than 35,000 retail healthcare practices within Sikka’s ecosystem – a number that is growing every day and projected to hit 100,000 by 2025 at the latest.
The judges were wowed by the entries they evaluated. Dan McMaster, Strategy & Business Development Executive, 3M Health Care, said, “I am always energized by entrepreneurial activity, and this was no exception! Kudos to Sikka and to the participants, who did some amazing work in a short period of time. Look forward to seeing these concepts out in the marketplace.”
Judge David Allen, Technical Lead – Supportability Engineering & Strategy at Google, took special note of the apps’ technical virtuosity: “I was surprised at the completeness and breadth of the submittals. These hackathons usually produce narrow, and sometimes deep, end user experiences, but this cohort included broad sets of features – even complete applications. I think this speaks well to how the Sikka platform accelerates developer productivity by providing a broad and consistent set of APIs. Kudos to all the participants.”
Referral management certainly seems to be in the zeitgeist, as the two top-scoring apps both zeroed in on this pain point for practices. Medcohere’s Kandru said, “Sikka’s single API helped us to build an interface to our platform seamlessly. This is a huge asset for us, to expand our network of acquiring customers through Sikka. The Sikka team was very helpful throughout the Hackathon process.”
Refera’s Gooding noted that “for someone who loves breaking things and piecing them back together in new ways, Sikka’s hackathon was a perfect outlet for me. It was a pleasure to see open gates to innovation in this space. Sikka’s well-documented API made it really easy to build a universal application for dentists. It was a little overwhelming with all the data they had available, but it was a great problem to have. Working with the idea of ‘going paperless’ by sending and tracking referrals, I wanted to streamline and improve the process anyway I could. With Sikka’s API, I was able to pull in patient information and mitigate double entry for the user. I was also able to improve the amount of data we can send with the referral – insurance information, notes and x-rays being the biggest improvement.”
The Sikka API Hackathon 2020 attracted registrants from four countries (United Kingdom and Mexico, in addition to the United States and India) and nine U.S. states (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Texas, along with the aforementioned California and Massachusetts). This diversity of perspectives helps to explain why the Sikka Marketplace has such a rich variety of solutions to help practitioners optimize their business, provide better care to patients and “punch above their weight” as they compete against larger entities. Whether you want to build your own API or utilize one of our close to 60 existing ones to optimize your operations, we would love to tell you more. Come visit us at the (virtual) Greater New York Dental Meeting in two weeks – we’ll be exhibiting in “booth” 1648.
Congratulations to all the Hackathon winners, and thanks to all the judges!
This press release was originally published November 19, 2020. View the original article here.