Hackathons have by today become a popular approach for bringing people with various backgrounds in the same room, offering them a concentrated time, usually during a weekend, to come up with innovative approaches to solve various challenges.

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One of the global organizations running hackathons for healthcare problems is Hacking Health. Founded in 2012 in Canada, the movement grew to 17 countries by today and is active in over 60 cities.

From short meetings to transformative innovation hubs

Hacking health encourages collaboration of different stakeholders in healthcare and inclusion of professionals such as designers, programmers and technical specialists in early stages of problem-solving.

As a non-profit organisation, Hacking Health is supported by volunteers in each active city, where they catalize collaboration between universities, tech hubs, patients and medical organisations.

The cornerstone of Hacking Health’s global success is community building on each location. Chapters do not only organise one-time weekend hackathons, but also meetups and workshops which work as a regular forum for idea and knowledge exchange. Another format of collaboration are coopérathons — the new generation of hackathons, running over 4 weeks to foster quality solutions driven by partnerships and supported by the community it seeks to serve.

The Canadian medical association partners with Hacking Health with the desire to show medical professionals an additional perspective on their problems. Sometimes, events are organised inside the hospitals. “Not each idea born during a hackathon turns into a company, nor do all participants have entrepreneurial aspirations, but people always make new connections and acquire new knowledge,” says Annie Lamontagne, the current Special Projects Advisor and former Head of Global Growth at Hacking Health. Her background is in social sciences — she did a thesis on the Institutional Configuration of Corporate Social Responsibility in Brazil and Canada, preceded by a Masters in Social Sciences in 2010, with a dissertation on socio-environmental conflicts. Annie was a part of Amnesty International for several years before joining Hacking Health, where she is pursuing her passion for projects with social impact.

As she likes to emphasize, health innovation management is an emerging and evolving science, and even when hospitals are open to new ideas, they might struggle in translating them to practice.

Health innovation management

“At one time a speech therapist designed a solution for her clinical practice. She did not want to start a company but wanted to see her idea used in her everyday work. Before that was possible, she hit a lot of barriers inside the institution and had to put a lot of effort in justifying the legal requirements, get management approval, etc., to be able to use the solution,” says Annie Lamontagne.

Another persistent hackathon participant was Dr. Denis Vincent, an Edmonton-based physician, who suffered a loss of a patient due to a misplaced fax document. He started looking for a solution to prevent such things from ever happening again. At the Hacking Health Edmonton hackathon in 2013, Dr. Vincent created ezReferral, a powerful cloud-based, secure medical referral management tool that keeps all parties on the same page: family doctor, specialist, and patient.

Hacking health uses different approaches for attracting participants from the clinical practice to join the events. One of them is to turn to IT departments inside healthcare institutions to identify the healthcare workers who complain the most. Hacking health sees them as champions — they are those who refuse to accept the status quo and wish to see changes. They usually become the strongest ambassadors of innovations.

One of the aspects Annie is passionate about is rethinking the inclusion of older healthcare specialists in the innovation processes. “These are people with tremendous knowledge and experience, still wish to be active and we need to value their participation,” says Annie Lamontange.

Some questions addressed:

• How are hackathons in healthcare evolving over the years?

• Hacking Health is active in 17 countries. What can different chapters learn from each other?

• How to organise a hackathon?

• How to motivate participants to join hackathons?

• How do Hacking health events differ from other digital health events and how do they attract participants?

• How do hackathons in hospitals look like?

• What follows hackathons in clinical settings? Do hospitals adopt change management solutions?