Brigham and Women’s Hospital Hosting A Hackathon

Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) is launching an innovation center Friday called the BWH iHub. To celebrate the new launch, BWH is hosting a hackathon event designed to “disrupt business as usual and foster creative solutions to the most challenging issues facing health care redesign and process improvement.” More than 100 clinicians, scientists, programmers, and others will gather on the Brigham campus this weekend to participate. The goal is to ultimately improve care delivery. 

On Saturday, teams will pitch solutions to problems to improve care within the health care system. According to hospital officals, solutions can be anything from a wireframe sketch to the development of a mobile app. “This event will bring together inventive, forward-thinking minds to change the status quo and create positive disruptive solutions in health care today,” said Lesley Solomon, director of Strategy and Innovation for the BWH Biomedical Research Institute in a press release. “Participants will end the weekend with a team, new connections and prizes with potential access to BWH’s iHub resources, and a hack on its first steps towards disrupting health care. Past teams at hackathons just like this one have gone on to start companies, enter business plan competitions, join an accelerator and secure venture funding.”

While innovation happens daily at hospitals in Boston, there’s never been an infrastructure at BWH dedicated to these entrepreneurial efforts—until now. The BWH iHub goal is to harness the power of our community’s inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs to reinvent healthcare.

According to a press release from BWH:

Prizes will be awarded during closing ceremonies on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3:30 p.m. Winners will receive:

• an invitation to present at the CareFWD 2013 conference in Boston on October 1;
• a chance to present to Ariadne Labs leadership for a possible Spark grant of up to $100,000 for further development of the innovation (Ariadne Labs is a joint center for health systems innovation at BWH and Harvard School of Public Health started and run by Atul Gawande, MD);
• a $100 Amazon Web Services credit code from Harvard Innovation Lab for each team member;
• a financial award of $1,000.

Also happening this weekend is Hackfit, dubbed the “healthiest hackathon ever” for people looking for healthy innovation and trying to build healthy companies.