On 9–11 September, innovation teams from different European regions gathered in Sofia. RareBridge was built by Saulius Fomenko, Mónica Seabra Simões, Delyan Georgiev and R. Liantsoa ZOFENO. Participants included professors, researchers and teams with strong academic backgrounds. RareBridge drew its strength from four different people combining their experience and contributing what each knew best.
The idea grew from a problem Saulius knows through his work with families: when a child with a rare or complex medical condition receives care across countries, records, test results and clinical history can become fragmented between languages, doctors and healthcare systems. Families find themselves explaining the same story repeatedly.
RareBridge is a federated semantic health passport concept. It aims to help medical meaning travel with the child across healthcare systems, with protection of sensitive data built into the proposed design. In three days, the team moved from a blank sheet to a working demonstration prototype, system architecture and business case.
Two mentors supported the team: Deyan Blagoev brought the business perspective, while Trifon Tsekov, CEO of 3-Fi, provided technical, AI and system-architecture guidance. Their input helped turn the idea into a coherent proposal.
Thank you to Kristina Eskenazi and Dimitar Dimitrov for creating this opportunity and bringing together a European innovation community, and to LithuaniaBIO for enabling us to represent Lithuania. We also thank the jury — Boyan Jekov, Kamelia Stefanova, Vesselina Tsvetkova, Elica Mollov, Ianislav Trendafilov, Valentin Savov, Madlen Jekova and Saad Aluani — for their questions, evaluation and selection of RareBridge.
The team left Sofia with more than an award: RareBridge also received access to up to €20,000 in cybersecurity services, supporting secure and responsible preparation for the next stage.
RareBridge remains a project in development. The hackathon prototype illustrates the intended approach; clinical suitability, security and operation in real healthcare systems still need to be tested. It is not yet a service available to families. The three-day hackathon was a beginning — the next step is to keep building.
