There’s an element of performance anxiety when you’re doing anything in Cambridge: The city just has this palpable buzz of brainpower.
This is particularly true when you gather 400-plus scientists, programmers, physicians and entrepreneurs for a weekend designed to reinvent healthcare. It feels a little like the first day of high school.
I usually come to MIT Hacking Medicine conferences to write about healthcare innovation, but last month I decided to participate in its Grand Hack. I’ve been skeptical (and wager that many of you have been as well): Do hackathons actually live up to the hype?
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.
