Applications for the Fall 2026 cohort are open
Join nowHITSA is the student association for Health Information Technology. We explore medical informatics, build open-source projects with real clinical data, and connect the next generation of health-tech professionals.
vitals.status → accepting members · fall 2026
GET /Patient/42
200 OK · 84 ms
Hospitals run on data. So do we. HITSA brings together students from computer science, medicine, nursing, and engineering to learn the craft of health information technology — the systems, standards and science that move patient data safely from bedside to screen.
Since 2012 we've grown from a study group of eleven into the faculty's most active student association — running weekly workshops, an annual 48-hour datathon, a mentorship program with industry professionals, and open projects that real clinicians actually use.
Every project and workshop starts from real clinical data and peer-reviewed methods — never hype.
Technology only matters when it improves care. We design with patients, not just for datasets.
Our datasets, notebooks and workshop materials are open to every student, everywhere.
Twelve committees, zero hierarchy walls — any member can propose and lead an initiative.
membership.growth
40 → 480 members
// the standards our curriculum is built on
A quick read from the monitor — growth, mix, and the numbers we're proudest of.
0+
students across 6 faculties
0
workshops, talks & hackathons
0
clinics, labs & health-techs
0%
return year after year
last_synced: 2026-09-17T20:18:00Z · source: membership.db · status: healthy
From Tuesday-night labs to a 48-hour datathon — every activity is beginner-friendly and built around actual clinical problems.
flagship · 48 hours
200 builders, real anonymized hospital datasets, and three tracks: clinical prediction, patient UX, and open data tooling. Mentors on site, prize pool, and internship interviews with partners.
49
days
20
hrs
30
min
21
sec
# predict 30-day readmission risk
model.fit(encounters, labels)
risk = predict(ward_4b)
→ flag: 3 patients reviewed
FHIR APIs, clinical NLP, EHR internals, health data viz — hands-on labs with test servers and real datasets.
tue · 18:00 · lab 3
Get paired with a health-tech professional or alumni for monthly 1:1s — career paths, portfolio reviews, and honest advice.
40 mentors · rolling
Meet-the-recruiter evenings, CV clinics tailored to health-tech roles, and a private job board fed by our 24 industry partners.
Bi-weekly deep reads of clinical informatics papers — no prior stats degree required, bring questions.
thu · bi-weekly
Trivia nights, hospital visits, game evenings — because the best teams are the ones that know each other.
monthly · student commons
Free for members, no experience needed for most sessions — and yes, there is always food.
Hands-on lab building a patient dashboard on the FHIR R4 standard. Laptops required — we provide test servers and sample EHR data.
18:00 – 20:30
Tech Hub, Room 204
48 hours, real anonymized hospital datasets, and 200 builders. Categories: clinical prediction, patient UX, and open data tooling. Prize pool + internships.
48 hours
Innovation Center
what you missed · 4 completed
// live · GET /api/events?scope=past
Welcome Night 2026
New-member mixer with demo stations — 96 sign-ups in one evening, a chapter record.
FHIR Clinic #0 — JSON & REST basics
First contact with resources, bundles, and a sandbox FHIR server. Zero prior experience required.
e-Health Law: GDPR in the Clinic
Guest lecture by a hospital privacy officer — consent, data minimization, standing room only.
Spring Datathon 2026
43 teams, 6 mentors, 1 working sepsis-alert prototype — the winning build now lives on GitHub.
Eight officers, six faculties, one shared belief that health tech is a team sport. Tap a card to meet them — and say hi at any event, we don't bite (we debug).
+ 12 committee leads and 40 mentors — 60+ students run this association
Unsolicited, lightly edited for length, and exactly why we keep doing this.
I joined as a first-year who barely knew what FHIR stood for. Two semesters later I was demoing a patient-readmission dashboard to a hospital CIO. HITSA changed the entire direction of my degree.
The journal club is the best-kept secret on campus. Reading real clinical studies with people from medicine, nursing, and CS — you learn how differently every discipline sees the same data.
Our hackathon team met at a Tuesday workshop. We shipped a medication-interaction checker in 48 hours and it became my strongest portfolio piece for internship applications.
As a nursing student I was nervous about the 'tech' part. Turns out clinicians who can speak data are exactly what health tech teams are missing — and HITSA is where they learn it.
I came to give one guest talk. I stayed for three semesters as a mentor because the questions these students ask are sharper than the ones I get at conferences.
One member, one story, one thing they actually shipped — a rotating close-up of the people who keep HITSA's pulse steady.
Every dataset we ask to reuse belongs to someone who trusted a hospital with their worst week. Governance is how we earn that trust a second time.
trust is infrastructure
Faculty brief on the secondary use of EHR data — now cited in the research-ethics guidelines of two departments.
members represented
policy reviews led
data breaches — ever
Our best clinical interface is a nurse who slept eight hours. Everything we ship has to survive the other kind of shift.
respect the night shift
Clinical mentor network — 40 mentors across three hospitals, matched with members inside a week.
mentors recruited
matched in week one
partner hospitals
Resource versioning is a personality test. Our sandbox server has opinions — and so far, every single one has held up in production.
strong opinions, versioned
HITSA's sandbox FHIR server and open-source CLI — running in coursework at fourteen universities.
requests served
repos maintained
reboots since 2024
Nobody remembers a hackathon by its catering. They remember minute 2,471, when the pipeline finally went green and the room lost its mind.
48 hours, no mercy
Annual Health Datathon — 168 builders, 43 teams, one working sepsis alert by Sunday's demo.
datathons directed
builders hosted
pizzas ordered at 2 a.m.
I watch clinicians fight our prototypes for an hour, then I delete half of what we designed. The half that survives always tests better.
less UI, more care
Patient-UX research group and our WCAG-first design system — now the default across every HITSA build.
usability sessions run
findings filed
prototypes sharpened
// auto-rotates · hover to pause
our partners & friends
From a library study group to the faculty's most active student association — the patient chart of HITSA itself.
Founded by CS and nursing students who kept meeting in the library to dissect EHR vendor documentation for fun. The faculty advisor insisted we make it official.
38 participants, one borrowed server, and a pizza budget that ran out at hour 31. The sepsis-alert prototype from that night is still cited in our intro lectures.
Six alumni returned as mentors. Within a year, 40 professionals from clinics, labs, and health-tech companies were holding monthly 1:1s with members.
When campus closed, we moved workshops online and opened them to every faculty. Membership doubled. The virtual journal club became our most-attended event.
Twelve cleaned, documented, citation-ready health datasets — used by coursework, hackathons, and student research in 14 countries.
Six faculties, 24 industry partners, a regional hackathon trophy, and a fall cohort that's our largest ever. The best chapters are still being written.
// chart continues — next entry could be yours
This is the material health IT professionals work with every day. Explore fully synthetic charts in the human-readable view — then flip them to raw FHIR R4, the interoperability standard we teach in workshops.
HITSA sandbox · FHIR R4 record
Amina Yusuf
MRN SBX-114-2026 · DOB 1999-03-14 · 27y female · blood O+
synthetic data — not a real patient
printed 9/18/2026, 12:29:38 PM
Amina Yusuf
sandbox patient · synthetic data
demographics
recent encounters
care team
Dr. L. Haddad
Primary care
Nurse P. Öztürk
Care coordinator
Dr. M. Duarte
Endocrinology
record summary
3
active problems
3
active meds
5
vaccines
3
flagged labs
view: overview · human-readable · records.histsa.dev/sandbox/sandbox-ay-114 · generated by the HITSA patient record explorer — synthetic sandbox data for education, not for clinical use.
10 · join us
Applications take two minutes. No fees, no prerequisites, no interviews — just tell us who you are and show up.
// no fees · open to all faculties · beginners welcome
The six questions we hear most often — answered honestly. Anything else, just ask.
Drop us a line or catch an officer at any event — we answer everything, especially the awkward ones.
Contact usPartnership proposals, guest speaker ideas, or just curious about health IT — our inbox is open.
office
Faculty of CS & Health Tech · Building C, Room 214
office_hours
Mon–Fri · 09:00 – 17:00
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