When Hacking Improves Lives: My Experience of MIT’s Grand Hack 2016

Boston skyline from across Charles River

How it all Started and Leading up to the Event

A year back I was at a medical conference in Boston. In between sessions, with my mind phased out by the academic overdrive, I came across a promotional flyer for a certain ‘Medical Hackathon’ to be organized by MIT as part of their ‘Hacking Medicine’ initiative. Unclear what it was about, I asked my team at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, to investigate further. My team and I had been expanding ‘Critical Creative Innovative Thinking’- a platform pushing for reformation in thinking and doing via biomedicine and healthcare for low-resource countries; hence, they found this event quite relatable and the response I received from the very capable young colleagues, predominantly medical students, excited me.

Medical hackathons were events in which MIT Hacking Medicine brought together engineers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, designers and financiers to ‘hack out’ tangible solutions to systemic healthcare issues. With the mission to energize the health ecosystem to solve healthcare’s biggest challenges, Hacking Medicine had already facilitated nearly 70 hackathons across a dozen countries and multiple US states- all in just 4 years. These hackathons directly contributed to the formation of 15+ companies that had raised over $90 million in financing.

MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack 2016 logo

When I reached out to Hacking Medicine I was delighted by their enthusiastic response and willingness to help us out. They invited me to attend their ‘Grand Hack’ in April and learn from it, so we could carry out our first medical hackathon in Karachi. We are grateful to AKU’s Dean and CEO for approving our budget not only to attend the event in Boston, but also to hold our own hackathon later in the year. There were 3 uber pleasant individuals from MIT Hacking Medicine who were my guides and facilitators for the subsequent 3-4 months building up to the Grand Hack 2016: (i) Christopher Lee, PhD student at MIT, co-director of Hacking Medicine, and a successful health entrepreneur. (ii) Tatyana Gubin, undergraduate student at MIT, also a co-director of Hacking Medicine.  (iii) Ayesha Khalid MD, faculty advisor, ENT surgeon, MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and a successful entrepreneur.

I arrived in Boston a week before the Grand Hack to attend the pre-event meetings, shadow the organizing team, take notes and learn- all in preparation for our own event in Karachi later this fall. I was quite impressed by the way the organizers (students for the most part, with minimal faculty intervention) were planning the event. The sheer number of hackathons they had successfully organized was, in and of itself, a testament to their ability to make the current one seem like a piece of cake – well, at least to me observing from the sidelines! I must mention that the meetings were being held in the evenings, after the team members’ regular classes / work; these folks were volunteering their free time to this effort because they believed in its real worth and effects on health outcomes. The food at the meetings was also likely  pulling in eager volunteers – I remembered my own years as a graduate student and how free food was always a strong incentive to participate in such events.

Tatyana Gubin, co-director MIT Hacking Medicine,
kicking off the event 

The Event

Energy, Drive, Enthusiasm – this would be my summary of the actual event. As an academic physician scientist, I’ve been to scores of conferences the world over. MIT’s Grand Hack 2016 was delightfully different. Day 1 started in the evening with a few inspirational talks from healthcare entrepreneurs rallying the hackers to do their best; the resounding message being simple: whatever they would develop over the course of the weekend could have real life health impact globally. There were no dreary, run on plenary sessions with complicated, conflicting data likely of little global impact.  

The above was followed by problem pitching in which anyone interested was given 1 minute to articulate a medical problem worth hacking. The medical narratives that were shared as part of the problem pitching made the process humane and exceedingly entrenched in the personal: empathy and compassion for humanity came through. This was something I felt sorely lacking in traditional academic medical conferences - which tended to focus on highly intellectual, complicated thoughts and data sets with questionable real life value. Coming across ideas and problem sets with potential solutions that were completely patient-centric was a pleasant surprise.    

Problem pitching 

After the individual problem pitching, participants were given the evening to approach those whose problem areas intrigued them the most and to form teams around them. Inter-disciplinarity was emphasized for all teams that would hack away at the problems over the weekend. This way IT (techie) support would function alongside engineering, design, medical, etc. The team members consisted of young and old, non-hierarchically. There were students of biomedicine, informatics, analytics, engineering/design, working alongside professors of medicine, venture capitalists, bankers, as well as plain enthusiasts of such hacking games. All were there because they wanted to utilize their weekend meaningfully. There were those enticed by the awards (cash) and recognition, as well as the potential to strike gold – form a company if the solution proposed was picked up by some financier, pharma or device company – and there were plenty of those present.

Team hacking and outcome

The next day was spent in fine tuning the problem pitch and the potential solution, developing a business plan, and so on. This was all done in teams - members would pick up individual tasks – such as doing a literature search to gather evidence for what was being proposed, etc. Someone would poll the community if their particular problem pitch required a quick survey of sorts (as a feasibility analysis). There were several mentors who, if taken together, were experts on virtually everything under the sun and were available to assist the teams in brainstorming, especially if road blocks were reached and further idea generation or resolution was required. 

View from MIT Media Lab; Bolly X'ing while hacking!

The most fun moment of day 2 of Grand Hack 2016 was ‘Bolly X’ – after several hours of hacking, all participants were encouraged to leave their work stations and to indulge in a fusion of bhangra and hip hop dancing; the premise being that movement to music would get the creative juices to flow!   

On the third day the teams were given an opportunity to practice pitch their ideas / solutions to a set of mentors / judges and then to incorporate their suggestions to improve their final presentations. The actual presentations were strictly timed – each team had 3 minutes to present plus 2 minutes of Q & A to convince judges that theirs was the idea worthy of being awarded and, hopefully, taken further towards full development and implementation. The pitches ranged from a smart phone app for detecting pediatric seizures and sounding alarms for parents, to a mental health app for young college students that could monitor mood trends and alert ‘buddies’ in case moods were tracking towards suicidality. These were just two out of the scores of clever proposals that had been hacked away over the course of a single weekend. In the era of digital health, it was not surprising that most pitches involved apps. However, there were a few devices that were also developed and their prototypes were shown. For instance, a neck collar that would immobilize equally effectively, yet, is more comfortable than the current models.            

Posing time: my team from AKU with our hosts

After the Event and Next Steps

In conclusion, Grand Hack 2016, MIT Hacking Medicine Institute’s flagship event was the largest to date. There were 20 organizing committee members, 50 mentors/judges, and over 400 participants representing 21 countries and 26 US states. There were almost 140 problems pitched in 3 independent tracks: Connected Health, Chronic Conditions, and Healthcare at Home. Over $10,000 were awarded to the top proposals. It would be interesting to follow up with and note what percentage of all proposals end up as real, sustainable innovations. What excited me more than the contest nature, judging, cash awards, etc. inherent in the Grand Hack- was the educational nature of the event. The team members learned from each other – while teaching each other. There was no hierarchy there: the young and old were equally at ease to shoot down ideas and then build them up, iterate, till all were content with what would be presented to the judges.

For someone like myself attending their first ever medical hackathon, I had to acquire a new medical entrepreneurship lingo that included terms like incubators, accelerators, etc. What I realized was that simply pitching an idea and winning a small monetary award is insufficient where healthcare entrepreneurship is concerned. A whole infrastructure is needed that can help incubate and then accelerate your idea towards mass production, distribution and revenue generation.  

Flyer for our event at AKU this fall

Multi-disciplinary teams hacking away at vexing issues of 21^st century biomedicine /healthcare to improve lives is much needed. The problems and the resulting solutions are based in the patients’ narratives – hence, observing patients, be they loved ones or strangers, can generate relevant questions that need to be addressed. I was inspired by MIT Hacking Medicine’s drive and enthusiasm to address and solve healthcare problems of global significance. Therefore, with MIT’s constant support and feedback, our team has been galvanized enough to attempt the first Medical Hackathon at the Aga Khan University. We hope to improve lives through hacking medicine in a manner that is critical, creative, innovative, and above all, resourceful. 

[from Health & Disease]

About the Author: Asad Mian MD, PhD is an Associate Professor at the Aga Khan University. This article's copyright belongs solely to the author. 

Acknowledgment: The author acknowledges Walid Farooqi, AKU MBBS Class of 2016, for reviewing and editing this post.