"You have more first party support for developers than any other EMR I've worked on"
- Vinesh Kannan, Staff Software Engineer @ Ambience
Canvas was proud to return this weekend as a sponsor for the 2025 Out-Of-Pocket GenAI Hackathon, where 15 teams of healthcare experts, practitioners, and technologists (collectively known as “the Hackers”) built new ideas from conception to demo in just 36 hours. Fueled by caffeine, creativity, and collaboration, the weekend saw teams rapidly prototype their ideas. Some even used brand-new capabilities of the Canvas SDK that were unveiled specifically for the Hackathon.
Out-Of-Pocket encourages sponsors to engage meaningfully with the Hackers, which aligns perfectly with the Canvas ethos of empowering developers to use our tools! We set up a Canvas sandbox for each team, and our staff were available in person and online for technical support throughout the weekend (yes, in the spirit of the Hackathon there was some deploying into the wee hours). Several returning Hackers were already users/fans of Canvas either from last year’s event or through ongoing collaborations, which was awesome to see!
New users were also impressed with how easy it was to get going with Canvas. As one Hacker put it, “I am the least technical member of the team and managed to get a working prototype to hand-off so props to the accessibility!” Others remarked how integrating with Canvas was the quickest, least time-intensive part of their build.
Hackathon participants were also among the first to try out new SDK capabilities we previewed just for the event, including:
- Custom Provider Application Pages - Embed custom tools directly into clinical interface
- Link and Launch Provider Mobile Companion Apps - Extend provider workflows to on-the-go capabilities through custom mobile web applications for use with Canvas
- Custom Pages for the Canvas Patient Portal - Embed custom patient facing content and tools
These new plugins allowed teams to embed their tools in the patient and clinical workflows as if they were first-class, native Canvas features. And in an open source collaborative move that we love to see, our friend Kerry Weinberg at PhenoML shared an extension with event attendees to enable agent creation in Canvas Medical using PhenoML.
Over half the teams explored their Canvas sandboxes during the event, and four teams featured live integrations in their final demos - ranging from practitioner scheduling to patient record access and care team summaries. We'll be featuring these projects and more in our discussion forum “show and tell" feature in the coming weeks.
We're so grateful to all the teams who experimented with and used Canvas this weekend, and to the Out-Of-Pocket team for putting on a fantastic event for hackers and sponsors alike! Want to try it yourself? Set up a sandbox and start building. Need help? Jump into our developer forum, we’re here to support you. It's a great time to innovate with Canvas and we can't wait to see what you build!
