Hack and Tell: My Experience with Artera’s Annual Hackathon

Giddy Up! Yee-Hackathon 2025

Howdy, ya’ll! 

I’m Eric, a senior software engineer at Artera, writing hot on the heels of the 2025 Hackathon. I came on board just before the pandemic, and over the last five years I’ve loved being part of a culture that encourages curiosity, experimentation, and trying new things. Our engineering organization has always been about being open to change and keeping what works. Nothing shows that spirit better than our Hackathon. 

Once a year, we set aside our usual Jira boards and spend a week building whatever inspires us. It’s a chance to get creative, play with new technology, and team up with engineers you don’t usually work with. This was our third Hackathon, and it’s quickly become one of my favorite Artera traditions. This year, we leaned into a western theme for the event and named it Yee-Hackathon. Keep reading if you are wondering what our teams did when we were given one week to build and few rules to guide us (and a meal stipend to keep us fueled!). 

The Hackathon Experience

The process is simple: if you’ve got an idea, put it up on the project board with a quick title and description. People can join a project that interests them, or you can recruit them. Last year I pitched adding a Dark Mode feature to our app (because everyone’s eyes deserve a break) and found a few likeminded folks to help make it happen. This year, a lot of projects leaned into experimenting with generative AI.

With so many AI-focused ideas floating around, my team decided to roll up our sleeves and give it a shot too. We set out to see how AI could help us take bulk user data and turn it into something more actionable. The system we built would take in a dataset along with a true-or-false style question, send both to a large language model, and then capture the model’s response. The model would respond with a confidence score as a percentage and an explanation of the reasoning behind it. From there, our system compared the confidence score against a baseline threshold and used that to guide people down different paths in a conversation flow. 

For example, if we sent a user’s location as Los Angeles and asked, “Does this user live in California?”, the system might respond with “true,” a 99 percent confidence score, and a reasoning like “Los Angeles is a city in California.” Since the confidence score cleared the threshold, the user would be directed down the “true” branch of the conversation tree. We basically made our conversation flows more intuitive, while adding room for error. 

Demo Day

Hackathon this year was one week, kicking off on a Friday and ending the following Friday, which is Demo Day. That’s when every team gets five minutes to show off their project to the whole company. There are prizes for Best Customer Value, Best Internal Value, Most Creative or Innovative, Best Demo or Presentation, and People’s Choice. The first three categories are judged by our executive leadership team, and the last two are voted on by everyone in the company.

On top of building, I got to experience the behind-the-scenes side of things by helping host Demo Day. That meant coordinating more than twenty presentations in under three hours, working with a production crew in different time zones, and keeping the whole show moving. And as host, it was my responsibility to don my cowboy hat,  introduce each team, and encourage folks to “giddyup.” 

Some teams had to make last-minute changes, a few ran long and got the Academy Award cutoff treatment, but most stayed on time and opened it up for questions at the end.

The Big Win

Each team’s presentation usually followed the same flow: introductions, the problem they tackled, their solution, a product demo, what it would take to make it production-ready, and finally the key learnings. The Zoom chat is always filled with oohs and ahhs. After a short break for the judges to huddle, my team walked away with the “Most Creative and Innovative” award (I’d like to thank the Academy!). 

Hackathon always reminds me why I love working at Artera. It’s this perfect mix of collaboration, creativity, problem solving, and just the right amount of chaos. Every year it proves how much we can achieve when we carve out space to explore new ideas. And after three hours of Demo Day hosting, call me a pony, because I was definitely a little hoarse. 

Ya’ll come back next year, y’hear? 

Artera, a SaaS leader in digital health, transforms patient experience with AI-powered virtual agents (voice and text) for every step of the patient journey. Trusted by 1,000+ provider organizations — including specialty groups, FQHCs, large IDNs and federal agencies — engaging 100 million patients annually. Artera’s virtual agents support front desk staff to improve patient access including self-scheduling, intake, forms, billing and more. Whether augmenting a team or unleashing a fully autonomous digital workforce, Artera offers multiple virtual agent options to meet healthcare organizations where they are in their AI journey. Artera helps support 2B communications in 109 languages across voice, text and web. A decade of healthcare expertise, powered by AI. 

Our award-winning culture: Since founding in 2015, Artera has consistently been recognized for its innovative technology, business growth, and named a top place to work. Examples of these accolades include: Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025); Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024); Built In Best Companies to Work For (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025). Artera has also been recognized by Forbes as one of “America’s Best Startup Employers,” Newsweek as one of the “World’s Best Digital Health Companies,” and named one of the top “44 Startups to Bet your Career on in 2024” by Business Insider.

For more information, visit www.artera.io.

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