eGov-PH Hackathon 2026 Top 10 Finalists

Datamaraws was recognized by the Department of Information and Communications Technology for building an outstanding solution to a long-standing national issue during the eGovPH Hackathon, held on July 30, 2026.

The problem

Guarantee letters have been part of the Philippines' core healthcare assistance program for years — a way for families to get help paying medical bills by petitioning politicians and government agencies directly. The process has always been slow. To receive one, a patient or their representative first has to gather medical documents: a medical abstract, an invoice for laboratory or medical fees, and a certificate of indigency proving they cannot pay.

That assistance is split between the DSWD and individual politicians, not distributed directly by the hospital, so the patient has to appear in person — enduring long lines just to receive help that is usually partial, not the full bill. And because each office wants original copies, the same patient often has to make multiple visits across multiple politicians, generating more paper at every stop.

The solution

A centralized hub connecting patients, hospitals, government agencies, and politicians, where documents are distributed and verified by the people involved without a face-to-face meeting. Medical abstracts and certificates are issued directly by hospitals, verified and encrypted to guarantee authenticity.

Politicians and government agencies can then review those same documents and see a mark confirming they were verified by the hospital itself — directly addressing fraud, which was one of the biggest problems with the existing process. Every patient gets the same exposure to every politician and government agency, removing the advantage that used to go only to whoever could physically wait in line — a real problem when the patient in question is bedridden and cannot.

Why it placed

Hackathon judging for a track like this usually comes down to whether a team actually understood the mechanism they were trying to fix, not just the symptom. Guarantee letters are a bureaucratic process most people only encounter when a family member is sick and the stakes are already high — the win here came from treating verification and distribution as the actual bottleneck, not the paperwork itself, and building the centralization around that instead of just digitizing the existing forms.

The team

This would not have been possible without the work of my team, Datamaraws.

Sean Matthew Viacrusis, our project lead.

David Grün, our project co-lead.

Ruben Aldave Jr, our idea lead.

Ralpha Palma, our lead designer.

And me, Arjhine A. Ty, as the lead developer in charge of the overall tech infrastructure.

What's next

GabayMed is still a hackathon-stage build, not a deployed system — the verification and encryption model is designed, not yet audited by an outside party, and there is no production integration with an actual hospital or government agency yet. The next real test isn't another demo day, it's whether a single hospital would let this touch a real guarantee letter.

"Are Human Beings Truly Equal?"

— Ayanokouji Kiyotaka