The medical field is ripe for innovation and looking to be disrupted. By using available tools in unconventional ways, entrepreneurs, physicians, students and engineers can really make an impact, which is what H@cking Medicine is designed to prove.
A production of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, H@cking Medicine is a 36-hour event full of brainstorming, team building and -- of course -- hacking. Jason Jacobs, the founder of RunKeeper, will kick things off tomorrow before the 80 participants settle into teams based on their mutual ideas and interests.
“Typically, healthcare innovation is painfully slow and, even worse, often increases the cost,” writes the H@cking Medicine team on the website. “We can make a difference by creating cost-effective solutions without waiting for fundamental advances in science.”
The event’s led by Elliot Cohen, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Allen Cheng, an MD/PhD candidate at Harvard and MIT; and Zen Chu, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Trust Center. Together, they work to inspire students to become healthcare entrepreneurs, with hopes they want to “disrupt and change the world for the better” and create ideas that can make an impact long after the weekend is over.
“We look for passion first and foremost,” Cohen says, referring to the 80 participants. Come Sunday, the teams will also be judged, and it’s then they look for people “who can be entrepreneurial, roll up their sleeves and make significant progress.”
Although the prizes haven’t been publicly announced, last year six teams were awarded $1,000. From a social network platform for interpreting medical imaging to shoe sensors that can give feedback to diabetic patients to avoid foot ulcers, the team saw a lot of different ideas that could change the face of healthcare.
“We are looking for big disruptive ideas,” Cohen says. “We want to help educate and coach people to think about how to fundamentally improve the system and toward that end we try to reward ideas that we think have a real chance of making a difference.”
Beyond the conference, H@cking Medicine is working to develop entrepreneurial healthcare courses at MIT that are expected to launch this fall.
“Healthcare needs hackers -- clever engineers and entrepreneurs to re-architect healthcare systems and create new products and services to impact cost and quality,” writes the team in their mission. “We aim to create a community that embraces students, entrepreneurs and life scientists in the shared mission.”
