The effectiveness, standards, and accessibility of healthcare services are all negatively impacted by corruption, which also raises the price of those services. Communities are deprived of basic services, goods, and resources, undermining people's rights to decent, affordable healthcare. Poor and marginalized communities may be further burdened by corrupt practices, such as extra payments for preferential treatment.
UNODC is committed to support global efforts to promote the integrity, transparency, ethics and anti-corruption resilience of the healthcare sectors through education, youth empowerment and digital innovation.
In this view, building and strengthening the integrity of the healthcare ecosystems was the overarching topic of the third edition of the Coding4Integrity youth anti-corruption hackathon series, which took place on 25 and 26 March 2023 in Mexico City, following a week-long virtual training Bootcamp.
The event was aimed at empowering young students and software developers from Mexico to design and build technological solutions to address and tackle real-life challenges related to the promotion of transparency, ethics and integrity in the Mexican healthcare ecosystem, including: transparency in public procurement of medicines; reporting corruption in the health ecosystem; integrity in the value chain of the pharmaceutical industry; combating of counterfeit medicines.
The hackathon was funded by the Siemens Integrity Initiative and organized as part of the project Global Action for Business Integrity.
Around 60 dedicated participants from all over Mexico, aged between 18 and 35, gathered in the Mexican Capital city to put their knowledge and skills to the test. Mentored by a rich network of experienced professionals in the fields of technology, business ethics, anti-corruption and healthcare sector, all participants worked tirelessly to build the new Coding4Integrity winning prototype.
The winning team, “FarmaBot”, was awarded the title of Coding4Integrity winner by an expert judging panel covering all topical areas of the programme. "This team helped us find where the biggest concern lies and how to use our mobile phones to identify fake medications. That is thinking outside the box", commented Ms. María Teresa Cantú Reus, Compliance Officer at the Mexican Association of Pharmaceutical Research Industries (AMIIF) and member of the judging panel.
The winning solution tackled the “Preventing and combating counterfeit medicines” challenge, consisting of an API that verifies the authenticity of a medication, complemented by an awareness campaign through ChatBot regarding the use of counterfeit medicine products addressed to everyday consumers. The registration is done with the lot number of the medicine.
By winning the hackathon, “FarmaBot” will:
have the opportunity to present its solution to important companies in the health sector in Mexico and will receive mentoring by the Mexican Association of Pharmaceutical Research Industries, A. C. (AMIIF) in the following months;
receive technology mentoring for 3 months;
receive technological equipment donated by the Embassy of the United Kingdom to Mexico (for a value of approximately 2,200 USD) to continue working on their solution.
Furthermore, the Top 4 solutions, “FarmaBot” and three runner-up teams, “Med-chain”, “Verificamed” and “DuDi”, will receive free technical and entrepreneurial trainings from an hackathon partner as well as the chance of being incorporated into the Accountability Lab's #HackCorruption global incubator to further develop their solutions and its related 1-year mentorship programme from experts in the field of technology and anti-corruption.