Hacking Healthcare: A Twitter Chat with H@cking Medicine

How is hacking changing medicine, healthcare, and the process of innovation? Find out on Thursday, May 29, at 3 p.m. EDT, when the MIT Alumni Association hosts a Twitter chat with Andrea Ippolito SM '12 and Allison Yost SM ’12, co-leaders of H@cking Medicine. Follow the chat at #MITAlum and tweet your own questions.

Ippolito and Yost designed this initiative of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship to bring together clinicians, entrepreneurs, and engineers at three-day hackathons to generate disruptive solutions to some of healthcare’s big challenges including global health, diabetes, and health IT.

“Many ideas happen after midnight,” said designer Nancy Liang in a Wall Street Journal article about a recent hackfest. Liang’s team came up with a prototype for MedSnap, a product that makes it easier for doctors to share images of patients’ ears and throats with specialists.

Other notable companies that have come out of past H@cking Medicine hackathons include Pillpack, an online pharmacy service that sends patients a two-week shipment of daily, pre-sorted pill packets dated and time stamped. Patients can tear off personalized packets from the company’s dispenser, and refills are managed through the service. Another hackathon company is Smart Scheduling, which predicts patient no shows to make day-to-day doctor’s appointments more efficient.

Since its start in 2011, H@cking Medicine has hosted a total of 2,000 people at its 16 hackathons. Notable ideas are selected by a panel of medical and tech experts and receive monetary awards.

Ippolito and Yost will tweet about how H@cking Medicine started, some of the resulting ideas, and how hacking culture can impact the world.

This event is co-sponsored by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the MIT Alumni Association.