BHS Computer Science Club Wins Hyland Hackathon

Five Beachwood High School Computer Science Club students took first place at the Jan. 11-12 Hyland Hackathon, a weekend-long coding competition that brought together roughly 100 students on 20 teams from across Northeast Ohio.

Juniors Tony Zheng, Leo Wang, Dotan Dana, Shamith Murthy and Alex Rabochii won the competition with their app, Medley, an AI-powered prescription tracker designed to help users manage their medications. The app allows users to upload prescriptions by taking a photo, which is processed using OpenAI. Users can then review the information and integrate it with Google Calendar for medication reminders.

“We wanted to create something that could make a real difference and was doable in 36 hours,” says Dotan. “We were throwing around ideas as a team and realized we could easily solve prescription tracking and integrate it into existing apps like Google Calendar. It was almost like there was a hole in the shape of our app in the ecosystem for prescription management.”

The team built Medley using JavaScript and HTML/Jinja2 for the front end and Python for the back end. They integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT through an Application Programming Interface and used OpenCV, an open-source computer vision library, to optimize image formatting for AI interpretation, according to Alex.

Over 36 intense hours, the students remained focused on coding, breaking only for meals, brief rest, and a few rounds of knockout basketball at Hyland.

“This dedication eventually paid off, as we only finished the app five minutes before the deadline,” says Shamith.

The students faced several challenges during development. “We definitely got stuck at some moments,” says Dotan. “One challenge was getting AI to answer with a consistent format as we fed it prescriptions. We had to give it strict guidelines so our code would be able to read the AI’s output.”

Tony said the team sees potential for expanding Medley’s capabilities beyond the hackathon. “The Hyland Hackathon is only the beginning of what is possible for this app,” says Tony. “The next step in our app development is potentially connecting the app with pharmaceutical companies so patients’ prescriptions are automatically added to their profile.”

Shamith said the team benefited from the hackathon’s collaborative atmosphere. “The Hyland employees were fantastic and created a great environment for learning and programming,” he says. “The event wouldn’t have been the same without them.”

Leo expressed the team’s gratitude toward Computer Science Club advisor John Kaminski, saying, “We’d like to thank Mr. Kaminski for finding numerous programming opportunities for us throughout the year and teaching us the fundamentals of what we know today.”