Innovating for a Healthier Future: A Recap of the MIT Hacking Medicine 2023
Author: Rupinder Hargun, R&D Project Manager at Philips
I had the privilege of attending MIT Hacking Medicine #hackathon for the third year. As someone who has been involved with MIT COVID-19 Challenge Community since 2020, I was excited to learn about innovation and developments in this field to scale medicine to solve healthcare problems. I was also looking forward to networking and collaborating with innovators, mentors, engineers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, programmers, and designers from academic institutions and the healthcare ecosystem around the globe with the shared goal of making healthcare a more sustainable industry. And as usual, the event did not disappoint. 300 innovative minds from all over the world, came together this weekend in Cambridge, to share thoughts, develop ideas, form teams and hack towards viable implementations.
The hackathon kicked off on Friday with problem pitching, and teams got to work forming and diving deep into the problems. I was impressed by how people who had not met before quickly formed teams and started tracing roadmaps to create prototypes.
On Saturday, expert mentors pushed teams to test and validate their concepts and iterate. I co-hosted a special workshop with Sandra Lam on Saturday evening, where we discussed “Corporate Entrepreneurship” and how to drive innovation within large organizations. Sandra Lam has recently published a book on Corporate Innovation. In her talk, she covered frameworks in corporate innovation, while I added the perspectives of an industry practitioner in the healthcare field.
On Sunday, I was part of the judging panel for the #SustainableHealthcare Track, which was one of three tracks in the hackathon. The Sustainable Healthcare Track focused on making healthcare a more sustainable industry by reducing waste and overuse, managing resources and time better, and expanding preventive care outside of the hospital system. The other two tracks were focused on early cancer detection and decentralized care.
Overall, the hackathon was an amazing opportunity to learn and collaborate with professionals from different fields. I came back with plenty of ideas to put to work in my work on sustainable healthcare at Philips. I also got to meet with many students, universities, hospitals, and startups ecosystem who can help push the field forward and can form the basis of new partnership ecosystems. I look forward to seeing how the teams and ideas that came out of this hackathon will help spark the next wave of innovation in healthcare.
MIT Hacking Medicine’s commitment to accelerating healthcare innovation and energizing the healthcare community is inspiring, and I look forward to participating in their future events.
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Originally published at LinkedIn on 29/05/2023.
