Introduction

This hackathon will be hosted and organized by the eHealth and Telemedicine Program of B.P.Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Dharan Nepal. A brief description of hackathons: it is a blend of words “hack” and “marathon.” It is an event hosted as an intense one-day, multi-day, or few hours event in which individuals of diverse expertise come together to intensively collaborate on solution finding.

Hackathons are a fantastic environment for networking between academia and industry, and a real opportunity for students and young professionals to showcase their skills. We would be utilizing this event for idea generation, recruitment, and finding solutions to some of healthcare’s most challenging problems.

This hackathon is expected to bring together designers, technicians, engineers, patients, doctors and creative thinking entrepreneurs and innovators to develop synergistic innovations and devices with patient-centered wellness and treatment as the focus. We might also be focused on ‘smartifying’ existing devices – making them digitally connected, improving their user-friendliness, to work across platforms and to monitor and potentially use data analytics to better manage the common health problems. This initial event will see collaboration and innovation from people from a range of disciplines and backgrounds, including health care professionals, designers, engineers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, marketers, industry experts, and community members or patients. A select group of young talents, divided into teams and supported by mentors, will test creativity, adaptability, teamwork and pragmatism to respond to the design challenges.

In a nutshell, a hackathon is an interdisciplinary event where participants from different areas of expertise collaborate in teams to find innovative solutions to health care related challenges under expert supervision.

During the hackathon, participants will aim to develop the best ideas for actual products or prototypes in order to make a big difference for patients as well as health care professionals around the globe. The event will also offers the opportunity for extensive networking: interdisciplinary connections can drive surprising collaborations.

1. Identifying the problem: the emphasis on identifying and specifying the problem is aptly the first, second, and third steps at this Hackathon. Many quality improvement sources refer to identifying and specifying the problem as the most important part of building the larger SMART-AIM (Specific, Measureable, Attainable/Achievable/Applicable, Relevant, and Timely).
2. Building truly inter-professional team:
3. Pitching a solution: in medicine, we are problem solvers —in the hackathon, solutions must be novel and “hacks.” To achieve this, team members need to free their creativity to explore all possibilities, rather than focus on what is available at hand.