POINTING TO THE FUTURE
Gilead Pulls Together Leading Example of Hackathon Applied to HIV
While many times public health and HIV find challenges in driving innovation: Gilead pulled together diverse forms of technically from AI, mobile, to the frontier of HIV innovation. #GileadHack4Life initiative - a hackathon of which role was to leverage the best brains, members of the community, and health leaders to ignite interest from the tech community in helping solving one of the top global health crises. Many organizations from Path, Johns Hopkins University, Hornet, World HIV Day, Women Who Code, Tech Accelerator Startout, Penn Health Tech among others.
Nearly 400 participants from around the world were challenged to design software solutions to improve the lives of people infected or at risk for HIV infection in GPS regions. It was expected by the end of the hackathon to identify one or more prototypes --potential new and effective digital tools to improve HIV prevention, care and treatment globally. A total of 35 projects made it into the final rounds.
Why do Hackathons matter for Public Health and HIV?
Adopting disruptive technologies. Health leaders often face competition for time, and learning about the later technologies isn’t always a top priority. Suppose there's a growth of new cloud platform service (let's name it 'CloudX) in the market. Health industries often have long contracts and may not have visibility into how to leverage CloudX. Engineers already using CloudX may not know the intricacies of HIV crisis: the populations most affected, the existing solutions, and gaps. That is really where hackathons become cross education environments. Gilead really shined hereb by partnering with Johns Hopkins Professor Stefan Baral. Who lead sessions to teach the global state of HIV, the critical needs, and how the costs and growth of HIV+ is far from over. This is where the engineers get to work thinking about how to scale the response using software—which scales to infinity.
Dozens of innovative prototype tools were hatched by the Hackathon – from projects that aim to increase access to mental health services and police protection to supporting youth at risk for HIV infection to utilizing social media and laughter to fighting stigma to other projects that increase knowledge, skills and agency of individuals from high risk populations looking for culturally appropriate information to better access testing and medical services.
Awarded $45,000 in cash prizes to support further development of winning projects.
Created a network of hundreds of global technology professionals
Organized an expert, interdisciplinary, cross sector, multicultural panel of judges
Facilitated access to expert technical mentors , proved highly feasible and low cost during Hack
Engaged cross functional Gilead staff in GPS and across the enterprise
Lessons learned are plentiful and will be catalogued in an after action report including determination of next steps
The Winners include:
The Drop
CoitoCare
Kiki
Younite
Risky Bets
TransHelp-Nudging for Preventing HIV/Aids, STI & Transphobia
Testme4All
HHH: HIV Hoopoe, Hope, HIV Healthcare
Tenyae
Since it first infected humans, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) continues to mutate, raising the threat of drug resistance. To prevent resistance, clinicians must assign a precise combination of drugs to each patient, considering the known personal precedents. Machine learning presents a path to reducing the risk of drug resistance by crunching clinical data from people living with HIV.
Read the white paper: Machine Learning Optimizes HIV Treatment Regimens
The EuResist prediction system helps clinicians choose the best drugs for any given HIV genetic variant, and has performed better than expert physicians in a published study of the ability to predict the outcome of a given treatment.
IBM, public health institutions, Tech4HIV and other multi-sectoral partners continue to investigate the use of existing and emerging technologies to increase the quality and quantity of HIV-related data collection, analysis and sharing to inform HIV prevention and treatment strategies.
case studies
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Over four decades of the HIV pandemic, gay and bisexual men have been well known to bear a disproportionate burden of HIV due to the biology of the virus, which is compounded by criminalization, intersectional stigma, discrimination, and violence. However, many parts of the world where HIV burdens are highest are also the places where there is rampant stigma affecting gay men.
Ultimately, funding and programmatic decisions are also driven by estimating the numbers of people in need of services. However, deriving estimates of gay men at risk of acquiring and living with HIV is complicated by hostile policy settings especially where HIV epidemics are also characterized as generalized. In some of these settings, the only safe spaces for gay men are digital spaces and thus represent crucial sourced of potential data.
In the attached study, researchers partnered with Hornet and used social media data from Facebook to support far higher estimations of the numbers of gay men for program planning, evaluation, and estimates of HIV epidemic dynamics.
Results like this help us understand the diversity of needs among those at risk for HIV, across very stigmatizing settings. Taken together, it highlights the need for the HIV response to better integrate novel technologies to estimate the numbers of gay men at risk for and living with HIV.
Internalized Homo-negativity in Eastern Europe and Central Asia
To help collect data and examine the impact of internalized homo-negativity on MSM health, prevention and mobilization, ECOM partnered with the social network Hornet to reach hard to identify populations.
There were 5,775 respondents to an online survey across Eastern Europe and Central Asia. A high level of internalized homo-negativity was associated with decreased coverage of HIV prevention, such as knowing where to access testing or condoms. This created new databanks that were previously impossible and at huge cost savings compared to other epidemiological methods with greater size.
Internalized homo-negativity creates an additional barrier to HIV prevention. Evidence showed that MSM with higher self-acceptance were more likely to get free condoms: internalized homo-negativity reduces access to condoms distributed by NGOs. Availability of MSM organization has the biggest effect on opportunities to get free condoms.
Reduction of homo-negativity and increased self-acceptance among gay, bisexual and MSM is critical to HIV prevention and treatment. Policy changes, protection of human rights, and prohibition of discrimination based on sexual orientation are needed to impact internalized homo-negativity. A focus on mental health for MSM is also central to HIV prevention and treatment, and must be prioritized.