This documentation includes all the necessary information to understand helpwave's history, vision and goals. It will also give you a tutorial on how to get started with helpwave, so you can start contributing right away.
The longer you read, the more detailed and specific these descriptions become. So just choose your own level of interest.
helpwave is an organization specialized in the development of software products in the medical and clinical field. The unique selling point is the open design and the company concept, which puts Transparent (Open-Book Management) and Open-Source development in the foreground. The core team of helpwave is young and characterized by different backgrounds from the technical and medical field. The passion for good and uncomplicated software is part of the core philosophy of helpwave. Thus, long and complicated work on tasks should be avoided and simplified by agile development processes. Our vision is to develop simple, intuitive and appealing software products not for, but with medical staff and patients. We want to be the ones to enable medical staff to implement what they have long wanted. Together, at the grassroots, for the people.
The initial spark for the later project "helpwave" was created at the Münsterhack 2022 (September 23/24, 2022). There, 13 members of the team got together at that time, still with the initial idea of a coordination solution of the rescue system in the German-speaking area. Once immersed in this subject area, we were carried away by the possibilities of the innovation potential and the will and enthusiasm of the community in the healthcare sector. Quickly, more projects were added and the team grew more and more, both numerically and in terms of know-how.
In November 2022 helpwave got chosen to become a part of the SEP (Solution Enabler Program) founded in context of the Münsterhack. This membership provided a big network and connections into the local clinic scene, two-weekly sprint meetings with supervision of startup-related topics, 1500€ support for helpwave in order to provide oxygen to the initial spark.
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Let's face the facts: Software does not have a good reputation in the medical sector. It is non-transparent, unwieldy, too complicated, and employees and patients have too little say. Especially the staff often (rightly) has the feeling that they are not involved in the development processes. The result is often software that is perceived as yet another adversary in the daily clinical routine, rather than as the necessary support. In addition, there is simply a lack of technical solutions in many places. The daily routine in hospitals is - as our team knows from own experience - frighteningly analog. At helpwave, we want to change that. Our vision is to put health professionals back in the driver's seat and develop the software they want and really need. At the end of this development process, we want a networked, communicative hospital that works for the employees and patients instead of having to be overcome. Less administration, more patient safety, optimization of workflows and thus more time for what is important: medical care that meets the demands of our time both technically and humanly.
At helpwave we consider the following values as our guidelines in every decision:
- Transparency for customers, users, patients and interested parties
- Agile development with daily improvements of the products
- Full-scale integration of all stakeholders
The open source and health community is indispensable for the project. Every step, every meeting and every idea is publicly documented, discussed and made transparent. helpwave focuses on: "For the common good, through community". Software products should no longer be created for purely financial reasons, but out of an intrinsically motivated sense of commitment to the common good.