Time-saving innovations for emergency departments took top honors at the second annual EM Hackathon, where physicians collaborated with computer programmers, engineers, and other experts to tackle challenges facing emergency medicine.

The CodeRed competition, which combined the efforts of ACEP, the Emergency Medicine Residents Association, Hacking Medicine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Grand Sponsor athenahealth, started early Friday evening and continued through early Sunday

Teams delivered their pitches to a panel of judges, who rated the projects on health impact, technology innovation, business mode, the pitch, and the team dynamics.

The winner of the $3,000 grand prize was a team called VOXDOX, which developed a system to help physicians spend more time with their patients and less time with the computer.

The team created a natural language enabled system that integrates voice-activated software with electronic medical records, allowing physicians to order tests, labs and medications and to retrieve patient information at bedside.

VOXDOX team members are Darin Neven, MS, MD, an emergency physician at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Washington; Alister Martin, MD, MPP, emergency medicine resident with Harvard Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital; Rafael Aroutiunian, MD, CCFP, an emergency physician at McGill University, Montreal; Anil Tarachandani, PhD, CEO of USINLIFE biotech company; Maryam Zekavat, MIT graduate and computational biologist at the Broad Institute; Christina Kayastha, software developer at Vistaprint; and Binam Kayastha, a computer science student at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

The winner of the $2,000 prize for best EM solution was a team called Rapid ROS, which developed a system that integrates patient questionnaires and health information into an interface delivered to care coordination teams. The team had patients enter their own symptoms and medical information into an app while waiting to reduce redundant questioning.

Rapid ROS team members are John Manning, MD, an emergency physician at the University of Illinois; Smeet Bhimani, a fourth-year medical student at Rowan University in New Jersey; Phil Parker, MD, senior vice president of Hospital Physician Partners in Tennessee; and Angelo Kastroulis, a technology consultant.

Other winners were: EM runner-up, EM Compass, $1,000; Best athena API Solution, TrackBack, $2,000; athena API runner-up, UpdatEDpatient, $1,000; Honorable mentions: PharmaCube and FairMeds, $500 each; and the EMRA prize, Lung or Gut? We’ll save your butt, $500.

The 70 participants were evenly divided by clinicians and developers, with a handful of designers and entrepreneurs. Individuals made pitches to participants, with a total of 22 problems presented that ranged from informing patients while they wait in the ED to transferring encrypted data from one ED to another.