Opioid West Hackathon + 2018

BACKGROUND Every day, more than 115 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids, making the opioid crisis the top current public health problem in the United States. The problem continues to worsen, as opioid overdoses increased 30 percent from July 2016 through September 2017 in 52 areas in 45 states. Specific to California, certain regions of the state have a greater number of opioid overdose deaths than the national average, creating a need for California to implement solutions and prevent a worsening crisis. Building on insights from the previous US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Code-A-Thon in December of 2017, the University of California Institute for Prediction Technology (UCIPT) is hosting a Hack-A-Thon featuring HHS. This Hack-A-Thon is designed to bring interdisciplinary teams (e.g., data science/visualization experts, patients/family members of those affected by the crisis, public health/medical/law enforcement professionals, and legal/ethical/psychological researchers) with new approaches to solve this growing problem. Teams will be provided with various data sources related to opioid outcomes, as well as alternative approaches related to the crisis (e.g., virtual reality and augmented reality data, cannabis data, wearable and social media data, and data on behavior change approaches). Teams will have 24 hours to develop visualizations to address a number of tracks on the topic, with a final panel of judges deciding the winners.This event will take place in California and have a California focus on issues of the opioid crisis. The goal of the hackathon is for the winning teams to have their solutions implemented within the public health system to help address the opioid crisis. Lessons learned from this hackathon can be applied to other states to help address the national crisis. ________________________________________________ ATTEND THE HACKATHON  Interested in attending the Hackathon? Please click the green "register" button above to come watch the event.  If you are interested in participating as a team in the Hack-A-Thon, please visit: https://www.theopioidhackathon.com/ __________________________________________________ SYMPOSIUM SPEAKERS Learn about the opioid crisis from many different perspectives of people directly involved. Hear from Mona Siddiqui, MD, MPH (the Chief Data Officer of Health and Human Services), Tony Rackauckas, JD (District Attorney of Orange County), Bharath Chakravarthy, MD, MPH (UCI Health specialist in emergency medicine), Captain Helena Williams (Captain at California Highway Patrol), April Rovero (Founder/Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse), and Brian Mittman, PhD (Senior Research Scientist at Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research and Evaluation).