Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Leader of MIT Hacking Medicine is teaching startups how to disrupt healthcare

Like most people with an engineering background one of the things that intrigues Andrea Ippolito […]

Like most people with an engineering background one of the things that intrigues Andrea Ippolito is solving problems. The co-leader of MIT Hacking Medicine particularly likes using hackathons to find solutions for the pain points in healthcare and to bridge the gap between science and business.

Ippolito is delivering a keynote speech at the CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia from July 15-16. Check out the agenda and register today.

The hackathons are structured to ensure a broad range of perspectives from physicians, nurses engineers and developers. Teams are also required to develop a business model for their solutions that identifies a specific unmet or inadequately met need, how the solution can be delivered and who pays for it. The rest of the weekend is spent between stripping away the ideas and building them into workable tools. That way issues like validating needs, design and execution of the solution can be addressed early in the process.

Ippolito is working toward a PhD in engineering systems and she draws from experience she gathered as an entrepreneur and her work at medical device company Boston Scientific and athenahealth.

Ippolito co-founded Smart Scheduling at one of the MIT-organized hackathons a couple of years ago. Its software is designed to remove some of the guesswork from scheduling for medical practices. It ended up becoming a partner with athenahealth’s “More Disruption Please” program and participated in the Healthbox accelerator.

The mission of the medical hackathons rests on a few core tenets:

  • New technology is making healthcare scalable to help produce better outcomes at lower cost.
  • Accelerate the pace of research data to determine whether new technologies, medicines, processes or incentives are actually superior.
  • Quantify and prioritize what the biggest opportunities to benefit patients are.
  • Rapid product design, lean startup methodologies, workflow re-engineering, novel data collection, big data analysis, and info publishing can have powerful effects in healthcare.

So far more than 16 hackathons have been held in cities such as Boston, New York and Madrid, as well as countries like Uganda and India. They have also led to the formation of at least 12 companies such as PillPack, Podimetrics, RubiconMD, Twiage, as well as Smart Scheduling.

Although most of the healthcare problems that can be devised in a weekend tend to revolve around mobile health, that’s not the case everywhere, particularly for countries like India and Uganda. A recent webcast provided a nice overview of some of these startups.

One of biggest problem in Uganda is a high rate of infant death partly because of poor resuscitation skills. There’s no way for medical staff to get feedback on whether their efforts are effective. One hacking medicine team led by Ugandan pediatrician Data Santorino developed an Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR) in less than 24 hours. The small, device is designed to attach to emergency ventilation equipment to monitor and record the performance of healthcare workers conducting infant resuscitation. It also gives instant feedback to improve resuscitation technique in real time and to shorten training.

The increasing availability of 3D printers is also making it easier to develop prototypes that go beyond a sketch on an idea board or computer image.

I’m looking forward to hearing what Ippolito will have to say about the hospitals they have partnered with, such as Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as the collaborations MIT Hacking Medicine is cultivating across the healthcare ecosystem.

[Photo credit: Andrea Ippolito from MIT Alumni magazine]

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