Why you need to know about nurse hackathons
You may have heard the term ‘hackathon’ being tossed around in nursing circles before. Despite it being a buzzword, many nurses are unsure what a nursing hackathon actually is. In this article we’ll break down what nurse hackathons are all about, introduce you to some of the major players in the hackathon world, and tell you how to get involved yourself.
Hackathons are heckin’ hot
In short, nurse hackathons are collaborative, problem-solving events that typically take place over a weekend. During an intense 24-48 hours, nurse participants are immersed in ‘design thinking,’ which is a human-centered method of problem solving. To begin, nurses gather into teams and begin brainstorming possible solutions to a posed problem in healthcare. The teams then pitch their ideas to a panel of industry experts in attendance, who also serve as an arms-length resource while they develop their idea further.
The goal of the event is for teams to create a completely novel Minimally Viable Product, or MVP. By the end of the event, the winners of the hackathon are chosen with the hope of their MVP being advanced into design and production stages for use in the real world. This is what makes nursing hackathons unique—they’re not just an opportunity to mingle and network with innovative nurses, they’re a chance for nurses to take action on healthcare problems that challenge us in real time.
The hackathon all-stars
Hackathons have been around for some time. More frequently seen in computer science and engineering spaces, the concept of bringing together problem-identifiers with problem-solvers is not new. Healthcare-driven hackathons have been around for a little over a decade. Specifically engaging nurses to help solve hyper-focused healthcare challenges, however, only began in 2016, with an acceleration in nurse hackathon attendance seen in 2020
One of the more established healthcare hackathon organizers is MIT. Hosting close to 200 ‘Hacking Medicine’ hackathons globally each year, they have spawned 50 new companies as a result. By design, their teams are multi-disciplinary, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and nurses were thrust into the global spotlight, MIT began prioritizing nursing expertise. The only problem? Even though hackathons had nurses on their radar, nurses were not particularly aware of hackathons.
The very first nurse-led hackathon took place at Northeastern University in 2016. Only 200 nurses attended. But they were gaining in popularity. In 2020, amid COVID-19 lockdowns one of the most popular nurse hackathons—the NurseHack4Health (NH4H) series—transitioned from an in-person format to virtual. They had close to 1,000 nurse participants from 26 countries in attendance.
Take a quick Google stroll through ‘nurse hackathon’ and it won’t be long until you come across the name ‘Marion Leary’ and the organization she co-founded, SONSIEL (the Society of Nurse Scientists Innovators Entrepreneurs and Leaders). Leary, RN, MS, MPH, is currently the director of innovation at Penn Nursing and NurseDeck was lucky enough to snag some of her time for a conversation about nurse-led innovation last spring.
Marion’s passion for nurse-led innovation has been evident throughout her entire career. But she has been especially vocal about involving nurses at all levels of healthcare problem-solving (“We need to empower our nurses. They belong everywhere!”). After attending (and, ahem, winning) not only her first nurse hackathon, but the first nurse hackathon (the 2016 Northeastern event, mentioned above), it wasn’t long before she realized the true potential of bringing passionate problem-solvers together. According to Marion, it wasn’t so much the solutions they came up with, but the people involved that helped inspire the creation of SONSIEL.
Through organizations like SONSIEL and others, nurse-led innovation has captured the curiosity of many nurses. In turn, learning institutions have noted this. Many nursing schools now offer nursing certificates in innovation, whole departments devoted to this field, as well as dedicated funding—like Penn Nursing’s Innovation Accelerator—for solution-driven nursing research and development.
How to get involved
Even if you don’t think you have an entrepreneurial spirit, by virtue of being a nurse, you have a problem-solving spirit. And that’s precisely the foundation necessary for all nurses entering the nurse hackathon world. You may already have a nurse hackathon product clipped to your scrub top, like the LED uNight Light by Lumify; or perhaps you’ve downloaded the popular nursing app, FifthWindow, a wellness platform that normalizes nurses’ well-being (and designed by another NurseDeck Insider’s Perspective spotlight nurse — Charlene Platon). These examples just serve to remind you that the potential for innovation is accessible for all nurses.
One of the easiest ways to become involved in nurse hackathons is to join SONSIEL. Whether you receive information passively through their newsletters and podcast, branch out into online meet-ups organized monthly, attend their next scheduled NH4H hackathon, or want to design your very own hackathon event, SONSIEL has you covered.
Looking for more inspiration first? For first-person accounts and advice on how to broaden your nursing innovation horizons, you can browse through NurseDeck’s many profiles of nurse innovators, like RN Andrea Jaramillo, RN Anna Moats-Gibson, and Dr. Taura Barr.
Hackathons are the tip of the nursing innovation iceberg
As nurses, we are empathetic, compassionate, highly skilled, and hands-on. That makes us uniquely intuitive problem-solvers. ‘Make it work’ has always been the unofficial nurse motto (especially in the current healthcare climate). Nurse hackathons are one way to tease these creative, efficient, and inherently nurse-led ideas out of our brains and into our hands.