The FOSSEE GIS project, IIT Bombay, under the aegis of the National Mission on Education through ICT (NMEICT), Government of India is thrilled to announce the launch of the world’s first “Medical GIS Hackathon 2025 (Edition 01 - One Health)”. This mega event is jointly co-organised and envisioned by Honeybee Population Healthcare Foundation (HPHF), the Rural Data Research and Analysis (RuDRA) Lab, IIT Bombay, with an intention to provide a win-win for the participants (individuals/teams), partnering organisations such as ICMR National Institute of Epidemiology, Directorate of Public Health - Tamil Nadu and National Missions by providing solutions to implement One Health and achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC), etc.
The Organising committee is committed to further your participation into internships and research fellowships.
As a first step, we are jointly hosting this National Medical GIS Hackathon 2025 (Edition 01) with the theme of “One Health”.
The primary objective of the National Medical GIS Hackathon is to understand and manage healthcare challenges through location-based data. By using GIS, participants can develop solutions that improve disease surveillance, track outbreak milestones, and support mass gatherings and public health events. These solutions are critical for effective participatory surveillance, where both healthcare and technology experts collaborate to create real-time systems for monitoring and responding to health issues.
This event will highlight the population-scale programs, digital transformation, and climate change, all of which are increasingly impacted by geographical factors. The Participants work together to create GIS-based digital tools, apps, or systems that can enhance healthcare delivery, from better tracking of diseases to more efficient use of medical resources. The event focuses on solving real-world problems such as disease surveillance, outbreak management, mass gatherings and healthcare data analysis. Participants will work on creating digital solutions for health data management and crisis response, with an emphasis on One Health initiatives and supporting digital transformation in healthcare.
By applying the One Health approach and utilizing GIS, the hackathon aims to develop innovative solutions that address global health challenges, enhance crisis response, and improve data-driven decision-making across human, environmental, and animal health sectors. The goal is to create scalable, technology-driven solutions that can have a direct impact on patient care, public health, and the broader healthcare system.
Disease burden information is being collected in medical field at hospitals (outpatinet, inpatinet and laboratory), community (door to door surveys, research surveys, outbreak investigations, healthcare service delivery documentation) and self reporting of diseases in few instances. Visualing the information from street level to national level is humongous task and spatial orientation is missing generally in that exercise. Presently it depends on the individuals who involved in data interpretation and their institutional memory.
Disease burden dashboards can help to visualise patterns (spatial & spatiotemporal), drill down/up the information in maps, and filter the information by administrative boundaries and disease conditions. Further, the indicators may be refined to habitable areas of the admin boundaries for drawing actionable insights.
In continuation to disease burden, healthcare and related information may be seen as dashboards for monitoring SDGs (17 Goals, 169 Targets and 231 unique indicators). Localising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the process of translating global goals into local development plans and actions. It involves:
Localising the SDGs is important because over 65% of the SDG targets require local and regional governments to be actively involved. Local and regional governments are closest to local communities and can best address policymaking. Eg. Localised SDGs will help to formulate tailor-made programmes for farmers and fishermen and their occupation-related illnesses.
One Health needs support for communication, coordination and collaboration to have a continuous dialogue with its partner organizations such as Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH – founded as OIE).
Location is the key to solving this communication, coordination and collaboration by integrating all information for a specific location/area. Standardisation of address and using the same in the data collection tools will solve the integration by architectural design. Eg. surveillance information of a patient may be pointed in a map and address hierarchy can share the respective authorities for initiating timely response. GIS can also complement the address standardisation by bringing the concept of continuous geographical locations irrespective of urban/rural, forest, lake/water bodies, agricultural land and others buildings.
As a institutional practice, health centres are mapped to referral centres base on their administrative setup. Services like CT scan, cardiology units, cancer treatment facilities are avilable in tertiary care centres. These services are availed on need basis by the patients. Healthcare services are utilizing by administrative hierarchy such as referrals to higher facilities, and resource allocation to hospitals.
GIS solutions can bring the perspectives of the nearest referral centre by distance and time. This will help patients to choose the health facility based on their disease conditions and severity.
Individuals seek healthcare at their convenient facility near their workplaces, educational institutions, and residences. It is difficult to visualise the cases spatially and generate clusters using bordering districts/states and credibility of line list such as details from outpatient, inpatient, laboratory and community. Scan statistics, geographically weighted regression and related gis techniques can help the healthcare professionals to generate statistically significant spatial ans spatial temporal clusters.
Hotpsots or Point of interset (Best/poor performing facilities) may be shown as quick information on map. Additionally navigation to such hotspots, mapping the area for public health/one health response will improve the monitoring and mentoring.
Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) such as poverty, poor air quality, limited access to clean water, vector-borne diseases, and lack of education, significantly contribute to health disparities across communities. People living in poverty often face inadequate housing, limited access to nutritious food, poor healthcare, and increased exposure to environmental hazards. Poor air quality can lead to respiratory diseases, while contaminated water can cause deadly infections. Inadequate sanitation and pest control increase the risk of vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. These interconnected factors create a cycle of poor health, particularly in vulnerable populations, leading to inequitable health outcomes across society.
GIS maps environmental data like air and water quality, and pollution with socioeconomic data such as income, healthcare access, and housing quality to identify high-risk areas and vulnerable populations. It helps visualise regions with poor air quality, low-income neighbourhoods, inadequate housing, and limited access to clean water or healthcare. Remote sensing and GIS can help to enrich the environment data for drawing more meaningful insights.
Healthcare institutions, national surveys like NFHS, NSSO, and Census and research studies have decades of vital statistics, and demographic and patient information. There is an opportunity to use to data for training the AI/ML solution and recommend risk levels by location. This will help individuals, providers and administrators to understand the underlying risk of individuals. Further, this information will help to prioritise resources to achieve best possible outcomes.
A Hackathon is an event lasting for several days, involving participants to come together to collaborate and solve a specific problem or explore new approaches. The term hackathon is a blend of two terms “Hack” and “Marathon” referring to time-limited effort to create innovative solutions. A National Medical Medical GIS Hackathon brings together healthcare professionals, Data Analysts, Research scholars, and technology experts to solve important challenges in the healthcare sector. Healthcare professionals are trained in medical treatment, patient care while some are also skilled in data analysis and medical research. Similarly, technology has rapidly advanced in improving healthcare services and outcomes.
Hackathon aims to combine the expertise of healthcare professionals with technology to develop innovative solutions that address real-world medical challenges. It is a collaborative event, where participants come together to develop new tools/methods that improve the accuracy and usefulness of maps for a community. For example, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), participants can analyse and visualise health data in ways that help improve disease mapping, healthcare resource management, and public health decision-making.
'One Health' is an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment. It is particularly important to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to global health threats such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The approach mobilizes multiple sectors, disciplines and communities at varying levels of society to work together. This way, new and better ideas are developed that address root causes and create long-term, sustainable solutions.
One Health involves the public health, veterinary, public health and environmental sectors. The One Health approach is particularly relevant for food and water safety, nutrition, the control of zoonoses (diseases that can spread between animals and humans, such as flu, rabies and Rift Valley fever), pollution management, and combating antimicrobial resistance (the emergence of microbes that are resistant to antibiotic therapy). [WHO https://www.who.int/health-topics/one-health]
Human health and animal health are independent in nature. At the same time, both are dependent on the environement for being healthy.
The following are the major associated factors [Ref: isglobal]
The FOSSEE project is part of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India.
