Hacking for Lactation

If you're a software coding guru, the National Library of Medicine -- and breastfeeding mothers everywhere -- need you.

NLM will host this fall a hackathon to improve a database of drugs that could harm lactating mothers and their infants, reports Government Health IT. The team that developed Pillbox, the library's database of drug information and images, will break down the LactMed database and improve it using feedback from software experts, physicians and breastfeeding mothers.

During our one-day hackathon, we will take the LactMed system, deconstruct it and rebuild it with all of those stakeholders in a single room, single-day event," said [David Hale, project manager of Pillbox and a technical information specialist with NLM]. "We will look at our data and ask if the structure is appropriate and what do we need to do to modify it. Then, with the API experts, we'll develop a specification for back-end services that Web designers can use. What we will end up with is a toolkit that anyone can start to leverage.