Like most people with an engineering background one of the things that intrigues Andrea Ippolito is solving problems. The co-leader of MIT Hacking Medicine particularly likes using hackathons to find solutions for the pain points in healthcare and to bridge the gap between science and business.
The hackathons are structured to ensure a broad range of perspectives from physicians, nurses engineers and developers. Teams are also required to develop a business model for their solutions that identifies a specific unmet or inadequately met need, how the solution can be delivered and who pays for it. The rest of the weekend is spent between stripping away the ideas and building them into workable tools. That way issues like validating needs, design and execution of the solution can be addressed early in the process.
