03. 12. 2025
Author: Zuzana Novotná
How hackathons bring hospitals and startups together to solve real healthcare problems
In cooperation with JIC, we map hospitals' needs and identify areas where technology can make a significant difference. When a hospital encounters a problem that is long-term, rarely addressed, or inefficient, we turn it into a challenge and open it to innovators. One way to address such a challenge is to incorporate it into a hackathon.
One of the challenges we submitted to the Hack jak Brno hackathon, as part of this collaboration, called AutoCode AI, is the long-term overload on the coding department. Coders spend a lot of time manually transcribing an epicrisis (a summary medical report on the course and outcome of a patient's hospitalization) into codes for procedures and diagnoses for health insurance companies, which leads to errors, financial losses, and unnecessary administrative burdens.
The hackathon, which brings together developers, analysts, designers, and startup representatives, allows ideas to be tested, technical feasibility to be verified, and initial prototypes to be created in a short period. For hospitals, it is a fast track to innovation; for startups, it is a chance to verify market needs and gain their first real users.
Three AutoCode prototypes were created during the hackathon:
1. MediDoc (ACGTeam)
A functional AI tool for searching ICD-10 diagnoses using an embedding model. This is an artificial intelligence model that converts text, images, and other data into numerical vectors. These vectors capture the meaning and similarity between data and, for example, find content that corresponds to the meaning even if it does not use the same words. This helps coders check accuracy and increase the number of correctly reported diagnoses.
2. AutoCode Pro (Vojtěch Kadlec and team)
An assistant that suggests primary CZ-DRG and ICD-10 codes, explains its suggestions, and communicates with the coder using an interactive chatbot. It combines generative AI with validation against official code lists.
3. DRGxCoder (MEDINJECT)
LLM with RAG, which achieves high accuracy in determining primary and secondary diagnoses without the need for pretraining. For hospitals, it represents rapid deployment and immediate time savings.
Hackathons bring speed, dynamism, and the courage to experiment—and give hospitals the chance to access innovations that would otherwise take years to develop.
For startups, they represent a unique approach to the real market. For hospitals, they bring new solutions, savings, and motivation for further digitization.
From prototype to hospital testing
We are now supporting the selected solutions in their further development and preparation for testing in real-world operations. The goal is for the resulting prototypes to become more than just a hackathon concept, but to form the basis for applications that can help hospitals in the long term.