This was both my first hackathon and my first time building a web app with vibe coding!
I joined Heidi’s Hackathon, an 11-hour sprint hosted by Heidi Health, and was placed in Team 8 alongside three teammates from diverse academic and professional backgrounds. Our challenge: design a technology solution for one of three problem statements.
About Heidi
Heidi Health is an Australian medtech company developing an AI-powered medical scribe that transcribes consultations and generates clinical notes, letters, and other documents.
For the hackathon, participants were given three problem areas:
- Intelligent Clinical Decision Support
- Patient Empowerment & Health Navigation
- Digitising the Analog Health Record
Our focus: Clinical Trial Search
Our team chose to tackle the third problem statement. We identified a gap: there is currently no effective centralised platform for clinical trials. Patients often remain unaware of trials that could be life-changing, while researchers face high costs and inefficiencies in reaching the right participants.
Our solution was to design a platform that leverages Heidi’s clinician and patient database. By integrating an AI-powered eligibility scanner, the platform could automate the process of matching patients to relevant trials, improving accessibility and efficiency.
The process
We had just 7 hours to design and prototype our solution.
- The first 2 hours were dedicated to brainstorming, sketching paper prototypes, and refining our approach with feedback from Heidi’s staff.
- With less than 5 hours left, we chose to prototype using v0, a vibe coding tool I had recently learned about and wanted to try out.
What we did
Using v0, our team developed:
- An interface consistent with Heidi’s branding and mission
- A patient dashboard with a checklist to collect key health data (designed to pre-fill from existing Heidi records where possible)
- A demo of voice AI integration (via Eleven Labs) for eligibility screening and trial matching (the integration didn’t fully work, but we managed to demonstrate the concept!)
- A trial application page where patients could access trial information and track their submissions in one place
Vibe coding
So what did I think of vibe coding?
It’s powerful. Tools like v0 make it possible for non-technical people to build exciting projects and bring ideas to life. I’ve met others who’ve created amazing things this way and it’s inspiring to see what’s possible.
But will vibe coding replace developers? Definitely not - at least for the time being.
Here’s why:
- Codebase knowledge matters. If you don’t know what’s happening under the hood, troubleshooting and fine-tuning become difficult.
- AI can be unpredictable. A small request might unexpectedly change your whole interface, or worse – wipe important data (this friend of mine had exactly this).
That said, vibe coding is lowering the entry barrier for innovation. With practice and better prompting, the results can be surprisingly good.
Ending note
We didn’t win a prize, but we learned, got to build something cool, and made valuable connections. That, to me, is the real win – being inspired by like-minded people and getting motivated to keep experimenting with coding and tools like v0.
You can check out our prototype here: Find my Trial