Solo en 2015 la financiación para nuevas empresas que intersectan la tecnología con la asistencia médica superó los 6,000 millones de dólares, casi el triple que los primeros tres años de la década combinados. La industria médica donde las máquinas de fax todavía eran la norma se ha visto recientemente sacudida por los sensores portátiles, las aplicaciones de los teléfonos inteligentes, los programas de medicina a distancia, entre muchas otras novedades.
“Gran parte de la innovación que estamos viviendo se centra en darle poder a los consumidores, proveedores y contribuyentes para que tomen mejores y más informadas decisiones”, comentó a Univision Noticias Christian Seale, fundador del Startupbootcamp Miami.
Grad student Katarzyna Matlak MID 17 and a team she collaborated with won a Finalist prize for Vitality, a monitoring systemthat aspires to “create the new normal for pediatric hospital care,” at the recent MIT Hacking Medicine 2016 Grand Hack.
Working with an interdisciplinary group of medical industry professionals, theIndustrial Design major made prototypes of two wireless stickies: a foot sticky (above) that measures blood oxygen levels and a chest version for monitoring heart rate and other vital signs. Eliminating the wires currently needed to monitor chronic conditions in children, says Matlak, will reduce false alarms triggered by jostling and improve mother-child bonding.
Across all tracks, the range of issues being tackled by the hackathon teams was as staggeringly diverse as anyone with passing familiarity with the U.S. health care (non) system might imagine, ranging from medication adherence, to anonymous STD diagnosis sharing, to early diagnostics for Parkinson’s, to building better communities and coaching for diabetics, to a tool seeking to protect against opioid abuse relapse by monitoring communications with “friends” taggged as “safe” or as on a “watchlist,” to online bill payment, to physical therapy compliance and coaching, to a SaaS tool for traumatic brain injury treatment for veterans.
The ideas presented (developed within the confines of the hackathon) of course were early-stage, and some showed more promise than others. Some seemed to demonstrate a lack of awareness of other tools already out there doing the same or similar things — but I will chalk that up mostly to youthful enthusiasm; frankly, while a handful of ideas hashed out at a hackathon like this may proceed to development as features, products or even companies, the key output of an event like this is energized hackers eager to solve big problems in healthcare. As the organizers said more than once in the lead-up to the announcement of the winners of various categories of prizes, the judges are often wrong, meaning that it is often the teams that do not win recognition at hackathons that go on to develop products and form companies that are successful in the digital health space.
MIT Hacking Medicine events are known in the Boston area as fertile networking grounds where paradigm changing healthcare innovations, and multi-million dollar ideas, have taken root. It was here that Elliot Cohen and TJ Parker conceived of PillPack, which raised $50 million dollars last June, and where the team behind Arsenal Health, recently acquired by Athenahealth, got their start.
This year at the 2016 Grand Hack, a new group of highly caffeinated hopefuls assembled with the aim of leveraging technology to address major problems in healthcare. On Saturday morning, physicians, UX designers, software engineers and business students split into teams of up to 6 participants and worked throughout the weekend to identify problems and develop technology enabled solutions that fell into three tracks: chronic conditions, healthcare at home, connected health.
“Last year, $7 Billion went into digital health startups from the private sector,” said Hacking Medicine faculty advisor Zen Chu. “Everybody sees that technology is one of the only ways to scale medicine and accomplish the triple aim of healthcare—increase access, increase the quality and consistency of care, and lower costs.”
Whether you attended SXSW, sent a surrogate colleague, or just followed along via tweets and blogs, you know that 72,000 artists and innovators descended upon Austin, Texas, for another big event. Every year, there seems to be the unstated challenge that the previous year must be topped. As a participant, you hope for it. As a contributor and sponsor, you push yourself to achieve it. That’s what we refer to as the X factor at SXSW.
And in 2016, three healthcare advertising agencies came together to create a wide new range of possibilities for the ever-growing Health and MedTech Track. This experimental program at SXSW would require all of the agency partners, along with MIT Hacking Medicine, to work as one team to rethink healthcare. We’re proud to say that we did just that. Let’s examine six X factors that produced some amazing results…
1. EXPERIMENTING WITH A NEW FORMAT 2. EXAMINING PATIENT NEEDS 3. EXTRACTING BIG THINKING 4. EXPLOITING YOUR BABY 5. EXCHANGING IDEAS 6. EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS
It’s amazing what can happen when innovators come together with the common purpose of rethinking healthcare. We knew going into this process that there would be some interest and participation. We just didn’t know there would be so much. We knew there would be interesting ideas that came from the “hack”; we just didn’t realize the caliber of innovation would be so high. The agency partners were left asking a bigger question: What would it look like if big pharma implemented hackathon thinking as a standard practice for solving their big issues? Imagine breaking down a problem without the barriers normally associated with large bureaucracies. What else can technology do to improve the lives of patients? It’s clear that a disciplined approach creates better-than-expected outcomes. The future of innovation will come through the kind of X factor we experienced at SXSW.
This year at SXSW I got to hang out with the geniuses at the MIT HackMed Health Housethat was hosted in part, by HCB Health, the healthcare advertising agency that has anointed me creative director. It’s being heralded as an immersive experience of “human-centric problem solving.” In essence, it’s about asking the right questions, drilling down to a powerful insight and then building and testing—in real time—prototypes that can help people living with chronic diseases overcome the challenges they face.
