In three days, 15 startups emerged, aimed at changing an industry that daily impacts every single individual.
"What you guys are doing are transforming healthcare and changing lives," said Andrea Ippolito, co-leader of MIT Hacking Medicine, pacing the front of an auditorium Sunday night in the Sackler Center for Medical Education at Tufts Medical School.
Hacking Medicine partnered with Tufts' student-run MedStart to host Boston's inaugural Blue Button Innovation Challenge, an international movement aimed at engaging patients in their health through heightened access to personal medical records. Working in collaboration with the pair were the White House Innovation Fellows and the U.S. Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
More than 80 entrepreneurs, physicians, designers and engineers participated in the event, whittling down their collective 48 pitches into 15 cohesive teams.
"We had so much energy here Saturday morning," said MedStart Co-Founder Eric Schwaber, adding that the high level of enthusiasm carried itself throughout the weekend.
After spending Saturday building the beginnings of their company under the watchful, seasoned eye of roughly 20 mentors, teams had three minutes to pitch to a panel of experts on Sunday afternoon. The panel included: Brad Prosek, senior director of corporate development for Cubist Pharmaceuticals; Victoria Bartolome, business development manager at athenahealth; Joe Jabre, director of the MD/MBA and MBS/MBA programs at Tufts University School of Medicine; Kiran Reddy, associate partner at Third Rock Ventures; and James Ryan, founding partner at Farpoint Ventures.
"I was very impressed with the enthusiasm and effort of all the teams," said Reddy, prior to handing out the first of four awards, coined the Blue Button Award.
ArmMe walked away victorious, winning $500 and free entry to the Health Datapalooza, for their best use of the Blue Button technology. With ArmMe, the country's 19 million cancers patients can receive a visual landscape of their medical journey, complete with the ability to view dates of past and future treatments, as well as contact their doctor and network with fellow cancer patients.
Also leaving with $500 for the Best Pitch was HOMEfield, a mobile app capable of spotting and assessing the severity of an athlete's concussion, with the help of eye tracking.
The final two awards — Most Likely to Succeed and Most Disruptive — came with the opportunity to present in front of the CEO of smart products company Withings and the More Disruption Please arm of athenahealth, respectively.
PreventativeHealthTools.com nabbed the former award for their Web-based tool targeted at primary care doctors and aimed at improving the ability to recommend preventive care to patients. Winning the latter was SimplyID, a Bluetooth LE-enabled device designed to replace the crumpled paper ID bracelets currently wrapped around patients' wrists. When simply strolling by a room, doctors are able to pull up a patient's profile and track their location.
The four-person team behind SimplyID noted today's current ID bracelets allow for medical error — a problem hospitals shy away from addressing. "That's why we were so 'disruptive,'" explained Lauren Arbetman. "We're causing a commotion in the space."
Fellow teammate Lev Raslin echoed Arbetman, claiming they "added some technology into the mix to make the process more efficient."
What Raslin touched upon reflected the core of the weekend: How can innovation drastically change the face of healthcare?
Ippolito encouraged all participants, whether they won or lost, to "keep on pushing on." Her own startup Smart Scheduling never won the hackathon it launched out of, yet, through perseverance, went on to gain entry into the MIT Global Founders' Skills Accelerator and neighboring Healthbox. Smart Scheduling is now profitable and just recently inked a major partnership.
The SimplyID team acknowledged this weekend was just the beginning for them, touting the power of the program.
"We really need that collaboration across the floor," Arbetman said. "Healthcare is crucial to every single human. … This is the kind of stuff that inspires everybody."
