Principal Investigator Zahra Kanji
Project Website https://hackingmedicine.mit.edu/
MIT Hacking Medicine’s mission is to energize, infect and teach healthcare entrepreneurship and digital strategies to scale medicine as a way to solve health problems worldwide.
MIT Hacking Medicine is a group founded at MIT in 2011, comprising of MIT students and community members, aimed at energizing the healthcare community and accelerating medical innovation. We accomplish this by carrying out health hackathons, design thinking workshops, and networking gatherings to teach healthcare entrepreneurship. The group has organized to date more than 175 events across 29 countries and 5 continents. Over 50 companies have been created, raising over $240M in venture funding.
“Hackathon” is a portmanteau of the words “hack” and “marathon.” A “hack” is a solution to an existing problem that is developed by intense innovative teamwork in a short amount of time, also known as “hacking.” A hackathon is therefore a race to solve challenges against time. Hackathons are commonly associated with programming and computer science but, in health hackathons, not all participants are coders. They come from diverse backgrounds, address pain points in healthcare delivery, and assess business viability as an integral component of their hacks. Our hackathons bring together people members spanning the whole healthcare ecosystem. Our teams usually consist of patients, nurses, doctors, engineers, developers, designers, business people, insurance, and policy experts. Together they attack healthcare challenges using a diverse and interdisciplinary approach.