Supporting innovation at Moorfields Hackday 2025
25 September 2025
Clinicians, healthcare workers and patients from across the country were invited to collaborate at Moorfields Hackday, finding digital solutions to health challenges.
The event attracted people with an interest in apps, wearables, digital tools and AI — though no previous experience or technical knowledge was required.
As Miss Pei-Fen Lin, consultant ophthalmic surgeon and clinical director of digital innovation at Moorfields Eye Hospital — who helped organise the event — said: “You don’t need to be a coder to be in health tech.” Miss Pei-Fen Lin added:
We want this weekend to be fun and innovative, and we don’t want to limit people’s imaginations. In the brief, we said: ‘If money and regulation were no concern, what would you do to solve your problem?’ I think that liberates people’s creativity — and then we hone in on the solutions.
Miss Pei-Fen Lin, Moorfields Eye Hospital
Moorfields Eye Charity funded the Hackday through an innovation grant, which also supports Moorfields Launchpad — empowering digital innovation for enhanced patient care.
Miss Pei-Fen Lin explained that the event is more about understanding health problems and collaborating on solutions than developing tech skills:
We’re looking for people who have observed issues in their day-to-day lives, who wish there was something they could do to solve those problems. The coding bit is probably the easiest part of health innovation — it’s asking the right questions that’s the difficult part.
Tech support was provided by COGNISS, a no-code app-building ecosystem that allows anyone to create patient-facing digital health apps.
When asked what the advantages were of using a no-code platform, Kat Hancock, business development manager at COGNISS, answered: “Speed and efficiency.”
She noted that health apps can cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to develop, and sometimes take years of “blood, sweat, and tears as well.”
Kat looked across the room at teams huddled together over laptops and flipchart paper before adding:
With COGNISS, people are able to build apps without any coding experience, without any technical expertise. We’ve got people already building who were just briefed and given access to the platform today, and we can see their apps coming to life.
Kat Hancock, COGNISS
At the end of the weekend, judges with health technology backgrounds were invited to pick their favourite apps — some of which will receive development support.
One of the judges, Luis Diaz-Santana, attended on behalf of Alcon, which supports new start-ups and innovative translational research in ophthalmology.
Luis observed the benefits of having so many people from varied specialties and backgrounds taking part:
Whenever you bring together people from different areas of expertise, there’s always a spark. The solutions that come out of that are always the best.
He also saw potential in the participants’ COGNISS-based applications:
For a proof of concept, and for rapid testing and prototyping, I think it’s fantastic.
Luis Diaz-Santana, Alcon
The Hackday, which took place over the weekend of 20th and 21st September 2025 at Moorfields Eye Hospital, highlighted how collaboration and rapid prototyping can drive meaningful advances in eye care and beyond.
Event organisers - group photo
Congratulations to all the teams that took part, and to the category winners, whose concepts and prototypes included the following:
Moorfields Hackday Champion
Team OpenWorld – helping patients with sight impairment choose the help they need and want, making the world accessible in a personalised way.
Special Judges’ Mention
PANDA – a visual acuity web-based app that uses facial and motion recognition to help parents monitor and test children’s vision.
Moorfields Launchpad Winner
FarSight – using augmented reality tool SpectAR to apply elements of gameplay to eye clinic visits, helping children feel less worried and more at ease during appointments.
Special Judges’ Mention
ICEinsights – using large language models (LLMs) to improve patient–doctor relationships by bridging communication gaps around clinical care and patient concerns.
Community Favourites
MyEyePassport – helping parents raise awareness about myopia among children, with the aim of preventing and reducing childhood sight loss.
AttendSure – using an interactive chatbot to help solve the Did Not Attend (DNA) crisis around missed patient appointments.
EyeFind – a web-based app that matches patients’ eye complaints to the right care at the right time.
