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.
The Hacking Medicine initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, for instance, has so far hosted almost 50 such events, teaming up engineers and data scientists with clinicians in 1- or 2-day events that are meant to quickly and iteratively work towards initial solutions to a host of health-care problems.
Among early results is an infant-resuscitation device for use in developing countries. The Ugandan paediatrician who first presented the problem has now taken the device into clinical trials in his country. The MIT initiative has helped to spark similar gatherings in places such as India and Uganda, led by the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
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.
Thank you Grand Hack team for offering the services of 100+ professionals and experts in the healthcare industry. I mean, they got doctors to take a whole weekend to help a bunch of college kids with ‘pie in the sky’ ideas. Having time with just 6 of those 100+ mentors was an invaluable opportunity that I hope I took full advantage of. Time with these mentors not only evolved our project for the competition but, it also helped out the mentors. The mentors and participants networked, saw how each other worked in teams (aka future job opportunities here and future program participants, etc.), and overall everyone walked away learning or gaining something new.
This competition exposed me to the innovative side of the healthcare industry as a mechanical engineer and opened me up to a community that could aide in bringing my ideas further. Spending the weekend at MIT for Grand Hacks was definitely a spark in my early engineering career and I know it will help me later down the road.
Last week the MIT Grand Hack exponentially accelerated healthcare innovation by bringing together engineers, clinicians, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. How is agile methodology transforming medicine, and what should pharma marketers know about this revolutionary new way of doing tech?
Dovetailing off the success of last year’s healthcare hackathon, the 2016 MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack recently spanned three days across three tracks: Chronic Conditions, Healthcare at Home, and Connected Health. Bringing together experts from software and hardware design to medical clinicians, pharma scientists, patient advocates, marketers, and healthcare entrepreneurs, participants formed teams to compete and create disruptive health solutions.
Throughout the hackathon pressing problems got pitched, experts mingled, teams formed, ideas got prototyped, business models were developed, and solutions presented. Check out the highlights and over 350 organizations taking part; by the end of the third day each team peddled their final presentations to a panel of esteemed judges across each track, with winners awarded for every category. The Twitter stream and FB page caught a glimpse.
With the express goal to “energize, infect and teach healthcare entrepreneurship and digital strategies to scale medicine as a way to solve health problems worldwide,” the MIT Grand Hack creates innovative solutions to disrupt the status quo, and define a new and effective way of integrating key healthcare system stakeholders, subject matter experts, academicians, technologists, and business investors throughout an iterative design and development process.
A team that included multiple students from Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) has just won the Best Aging in Place Hack award at MIT’s Grand Hack 2016. Inspired by a mentor whose mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, Sven Eberhardt (Brown University postdoc), Youssef Barhomi (Brown University research engineer), Pankaj Gupta (Brown University research assistant), Nediyana Daskalova (Brown CS PhD candidate), Adrienne Tran (Brown University alum and founder of Neurocurious), and Alejandro Scaffa (Brown University PhD candidate) formed team “alzEYEmers” to create a unique solution based on computer vision, AI, and neuroscience.
Their project leverages software that can recognize common household objects as well as hazards, then supplies an Alzheimer’s patient with a camera worn around the neck. During any unattended hours, the camera serves as a watchdog: if it spies a hazard (for example, a fire), it can redirect the patient with recorded prompts, alert a family member, or even call 911.
“This was a very different hackathon from others I’ve been to,” says Nediyana, “The idea was to talk to many people from diverse backgrounds in order to think about the problem from various points of view before solving it. We spoke to six different people about their experiences with Alzheimer’s before we even began hacking. We really found it interesting to spend so much time thinking about a problem before jumping to a technological solution.”
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.”
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.
The Hacking Medicine Institute today announced RANKED Health, a program to critically evaluate and rank health-focused applications and connected devices.
Healthcare focused mobile applications make lots of promises. They promise help physicians monitor patients with real-time data, resulting in better outcomes and lower costs. They promise to provide treatment to patients in low resource settings with limited access to healthcare professionals. They promise to help you track your sleep, steps and symptoms, and take your medicine on time.
