Update: George Hacks is being held again this year, January 26-27, 2019. I’ll serve as a judge once again and I can’t wait to see what students come up with!
George Hacks is a medical and assistive device hackathon happening this weekend in Washington, DC. The students organizing the event have done a stellar job recruiting sponsors, “need-knowers” (organizations looking for fresh perspectives) and “problem-solvers” (students from all sorts of majors, from public health to international relations to biomedical engineering). I’ve been advising the team and helping to recruit judges, who include leaders in biomedical 3D printing, health care product design, and the national maker movement (just to name a few fields represented in the group).
Now we are looking at the judging criteria, hoping to infuse the competition with the principles of affordability as well as usefulness. Given that the competitors will only have a weekend, judges will not look for the polish of a finished product but rather the seed of a potentially transformative new idea or approach.
Here are the draft criteria for scoring:
- Clinical significance/usefulness
- Product development approach
- Potential to improve the user’s health care experience
- Technical difficulty (including how well they used provided tools and materials)
- Cost efficiency (has the team thought about who might buy or pay for the device? Are their assumptions realistic? Is there evidence of a business plan or how device/ system would be brought to market?)
- Did the solution address the challenge? If the team pivoted, does the solution address the new goals?
I’d love to hear from people who have competed in or served as judges for a competition like this one — extra points if it focused on medical or assistive devices AND was organized as a public-interest event. Alternatively, if you know of relevant resources we can look at, please share them in the comments.
Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:
- MIT’s Health Hackathon Handbook (PDF)
- Al Noor Assistive TechX 2017 judging criteria
- Huskie Hackathon: Health and Wellness Challenge rules and judging
- Rice University Design-a-thon judging criteria
A little further afield, but relevant to the subject matter of George Hacks:
- AARP Innovation@50+ for emerging startups in the Caregiving Health Technology and Financial Technology sectors
- Impact Pediatric Health: innovation pain points for pediatric hospitals
Time is of the essence so if you have ideas, please share them ASAP! Comments are open.
This looks rather cool Susannah. From the few I have been involved with, though somewhat more subjective, a key criterion I found useful is not only the ease of use BUT what the judges will think as the perceived value and usefulness to the user from the users’ perspective. More specifically, a solution may look great but how would a user feel in the middle of the day, between meetings or kids soccer practice …?
Nice! Judges should think about the real-world, real-life application.
My favorite example of this was when I was part of a brainstorming meeting about how to make sure older adults got their medications and someone got very fired up about a robot that would roll out of a closet at the right time. I pictured my grandparents’ and other elder relatives’ homes, stacked with books and crowded with furniture, which the robot would knock over or run into, and thought, “Let’s move on…”
Great comment from Bailey Browder on Twitter:
My advice: Be careful when using the term “innovation.” Just because one industry isn’t doing something doesn’t make the adoption or application “innovative.” I’ve come to view that term as being grossly misunderstood…especially in healthcare.
We’ve run a more general health hackathon in NC’s Research Triangle for the past few years [1]. Our judging focuses equally on clinical impact, execution and business plan, with some but lesser emphasis on the pitch itself and the composition of team. [2]
One thing we realized is that teams were very focused on the technical aspects of building something, but sometimes didn’t clearly think through how this would fit into the workflow of providers or the daily lives of patients, as another commenter mentioned above. For us, having clinical mentors from a variety of healthcare professions helped teams realize what aspects of their ideas were less-than-practical and pivot early.
We also quickly realized our first year is that teams struggled to understand the business aspect of the hackathon, especially if the team members were primarily from technical, pre-med, global health, etc backgrounds. We started requiring teams to fill out the Lean Canvas [3] before they met with our business mentors so that they had some structure to thinking about who their customers were (versus their end users), what other people/companies had developed in this space, and how the product could come to market.
[1] Triangle Health Innovation Challenge – thincweekend.org
[2] A rubric from 2017 is at http://www.thincweekend.org/THInCJudgingRubric.pdf
[3] https://leanstack.com/is-one-page-business-model
A comment with footnotes?! Be still my heart. Seriously, thank you so much – will share these resources with the George Hacks team.
Did you involve patients / carers / appropriate end users in the development of your product concept at the start, throughout the process, and at the end to evaluate success criteria? i.e. Did you systematically practice co-production?
Excellent questions for the problem-solvers – thanks!
Justine De Caires posted a series of great tweets in response to my call for input. Since tweets disappear, here’s the text:
Near the bottom of this post, @MLHacks gives some handy criteria for judging innovation at hackathons (possibly my favorite resource): How to judge a hackathon
Above all, slide decks should get less credit than even broken MVPs.
Making a slide deck is a different skill from innovation. Look beyond the pitch—some makers aren’t very good at communicating their product in a super engaging way, but that doesn’t mean their product sucks. Seeing shiny pitch decks win over less-pretty MVPs makes makers groan.
MVPs get more points for having the courage to try out their pitch deck-ready ideas and run into some of the problems that innovators would run into in the real world as they go from pitch deck to product.
Devpost also lists judging criteria for different healthcare hackathons (among others!), just click into each hackathon and scroll to the bottom of that first page; here’s a search for “health”
Good luck with George Hacks, @SusannahFox! Organizing a hackathon is a lot of hard work. Hope things turn out stellar!
-end-
Thank you for all of this, especially the good luck wishes. I will pass it all along to the ACTUAL organizers (I’m just a mentor/advisor): Paige Botie, Konstantin Mitic, and Isabella Sardegna.
To go from “merely reliable” invention to “socially robust” innovation, we need to think about the different dimensions of impact. For hackathon-developed inventions, you won’t have evidence of impact yet, but you can structure the way that you imagine, estimate, and compare the impacts of the contenders. I’d suggest a couple of dimensions on the reward side, and a couple on the risk side. Reward: breadth of impact (how many people will benefit?); depth of impact (how much will each beneficiary benefit?). Risk: familiarity/trust of adopters (how close are the inventors to the adopters… socially, geographically, ideologically); product/process integration (has the design incorporated the necessary, complimentary behavior changes of the adopter… and others in the value chain?)
Wow! What a weekend that was! I spent Saturday volunteering with my Moms Demand Action chapter at the March for our Lives in Washington, DC, registering voters. And I spent Sunday volunteering as a judge at the inaugural George Hacks event.
Here’s what I learned at the March:
– My people are people who volunteer. At the early-morning training session of 1,000 volunteers, I ran into friends from my neighborhood, a friend I hadn’t seen since high school in NJ (!), and I made a new friend with whom I worked all day.
– It is possible to register people to vote on the spot, depending on their home state. If you want to find out more, check out HeadCount.org.
– The key question to ask people, especially those under age 30, is: “Are you registered to vote where you currently live?” That stopped a few in their tracks and got them to register at their current address so they could vote in the upcoming primaries.
– The March was a hurly-burly. But when a teenager would take my clipboard and start filling out the voter registration form, it got very quiet. I felt a spotlight turn on above their heads as they were encouraged to take part in democracy.
Here’s what I learned at George Hacks:
– My people are people who volunteer, part 2. I reconnected with friends and colleagues I’d helped recruit as judges like Jessica Floeh and Dorothy Jones-Davis and I made new friends like Ruma Samdani, Frankie Abralind, and Duane Rollins.
– One of the key lessons learned by the students was not only how to approach a problem, but how to build a working team. It was clear that some of them had been through a challenging 24 hours but when it was “go time” every team had a great hack to show us — and they all presented them well.
– Even though they only had 24 hours, a few of the teams went out of their way to find people who live with the problem they were trying to solve, such as people who use wheelchairs who want to be able to shop without asking for help. One team not only went to a local store to interview shoppers who were using wheelchairs, but also got into a wheelchair and tried to navigate the store — and for bonus points they interviewed the store manager about the issues they’d uncovered to get their feedback on how to solve the problems. To me, they had the most compelling story (but other teams had more compelling hacks).
– Once again, the event was a maelstrom of activity, but I did find moments to talk 1:1 with some of the students. And again a quiet spotlight of encouragement shone on them.
How might we keep the spotlight on people who need encouragement? How might we extend the lessons learned this weekend into our daily lives?
Since my blog is my outboard memory, I’m adding this resource as a comment:
The Invent It Challenge Scoring Guide (PDF) lists seven steps of invention and a 4-point scale for judging (1 = requires development; 2 = approaches standard; 3 = meets standard; 4 = exceeds standard) for a possible high score of 28. It’s a great example of how to clearly communicate with participants (in this case kids ranging in age from 5 to 18).