Hackathons are powerful engines for innovation in healthcare, creating space for collaboration, creativity, and rapid problem-solving. This session explores the annual Hackathon hosted by Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI), where clinicians, data scientists, and community leaders come together to address critical health challenges. It highlights why hackathons are essential for accelerating innovation, the key elements that make them successful within the AI lifecycle, and showcases multiple impactful predictive models that have generated actionable implementations to improve health outcomes. This includes strategies to leverage non-medical drivers of health to advance predictive analytics.

​Beyond the ideas, this session shares lessons learned from organizing hackathons, including approaches for engaging diverse stakeholders and sustaining momentum after the event. Finally, it connects hackathon-driven innovation to the broader AI lifecycle, emphasizing how these events support ethical AI development and governance in healthcare. Viewers will gain practical insights into leveraging hackathons as a structured approach to ideation, experimentation, and responsible AI adoption.

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Speaker

Albert Karam, MS, MBA

Albert Karam is the Chief Information Officer at the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation (PCCI), where he brings a decade of experience as a data scientist to lead transformative healthcare initiatives. Since joining PCCI in 2016, he has researched, developed, tested, and deployed several predictive models for Parkland and the Parkland Community Health Plan (PCHP). Through his development of advanced predictive models for asthma interventions in North Texas, nearly 16,000 individuals have been enrolled in these programs, with tens of thousands more evaluated by the model for rising risk and potential engagement, enabling data-driven personalization, scalable impact, and improved disease management across vulnerable populations. Karam has also led elements of PCCI’s data analytics that supported the Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. His extensive experience offers a deep understanding of modeling workflows and the implementation of AI models.

​​Karam obtained an MS in Mathematics from The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in 2015, and in 2020, he earned a dual degree MBA and MS in Data Analytics from UTD with a focus in Healthcare Administration. He has been a contributing author for several peer-reviewed papers, an inventor on PCCI patents, and is a regular speaker and presenter at industry conferences.

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