Table 2.
Awarded prototypes developed during the hackathon and their strengths and weaknesses identified by the judge panel.
| Team | Prototype design | Strengths | Weaknesses |
| Group 1 (first) | A cross-device Web-based platform, recruiting junior physicians and lay health volunteers to provide services to men who have sex with men | Mobilize community resources: actively engages volunteers from local gay/HIV-related organizations; provide professional development opportunities: provides gay-friendly services training to physicians and provides multiple incentive mechanisms to motivate physician engagement (eg, continuing medical education credit and pay-for-service); financial sustainability: users will be able to try the service for free at first and then choose a payment plan for continuous services; compatibility: could be embedded within an existing gay social networking app | Difficulty in recruiting physicians to join at the very beginning, given the trainings required and free services offered at the beginning; the platform was not well developed by the end of the contest |
| Group 2 (second) | A stand-alone app, providing GPS location–based physician recommendation, Web-based counseling, and personal health record management | Addresses both physical and mental health care; social support: provides a platform for users to obtain peer support (anonymous forum to share experience and interact with others); health self-management: provides a platform for users to track their daily emotional status, with individual tailored feedback; user engagement: users can earn tokens via completing app activities, and use the tokens for rating physicians | Registration/log-in by users’ mobile phone number may be less confidential; high human resource cost for complicated qualification review for content that will be published in the app |
| Group 3 (third) | A stand-alone app, providing physician referral to offline clinics, Web-based counseling, and AIa-enabled dermatology assessment | Innovative feature: has an AI-enabled dermatology assessment to identify users’ specific needs; inclusion of both physicians and public health practitioners: offers a searching function for all types of health professionals (clinic-based providers and Centers for Diseases Prevention and Control-based providers) and gay health-related volunteers | Heavy cost and uncertain accuracy of AI-enabled disease assessment; highly complicated user interface and many functions within a single app |
| Group 4 (fourth) | A WeChat mini program that provides Web-based counseling, medical history and medication management, health education, and free testing tools | Formative research: the team conducted extensive formative research on unmet health needs among gay men before the contest; mobilize community resources: hiring both lay health volunteers (to answer gay-related questions that physicians may not understand) and medical professionals; innovative feature: live video streaming–enabled health education; HIV/sexually transmitted infections testing promotion: provides free testing toolkits that users could order from the platform | Too much individual knowledge-based education that somehow deemphasizes medical support; unsure whether there is medical support offered after self-testing |
aAI: artificial intelligence.