Pitch Competition

A Global Cause

Some of the best experiences I’ve ever had as a professional come from what you learn outside of the office. That was the case for me when participating in MIT’s Global Cancer Innovation Hackathon during my tenure with Advisory Board. While I had participated in hackathons in the past, they usually consisted of folks within the company working on either building a feature for an existing product they didn’t have time for in their daily work, or a side-project they where personally interested in pursuing. While both are noble causes, they weren’t necessarily geared towards bigger, systemic problems affecting large populations.

I pitched the idea of attending to senior leadership, who agreed to sponsor my efforts. Participation required that I fly to Boston for a 24-hour intensive where i’d work with participants all over the globe to  pitch ideas, work on problems, and hopefully come up with an solutions that’ll help improve the lives of Cancer patients halfway across the globe.

As an organization that serves the needs of Healthcare and Hospital systems nationally, the benefits to the organization where to solve real-world problems in healthcare, getting a chance to hear first-hand from doctors, patients, and clinicians, access to the latest solutions, and making connections with the our core constituency – something we were constantly looking to do on the UX team.

Picking Our Focus & Building A Team

Given the limited time, priority for the event was giving attendees an understanding of what to expect over the next two days. Speakers were introduced, describing the Goal of the hackathon and . All with ideas where encouraged to come on stage, give their 1 minute pitch of their idea, then dispersing to start team formation. Teams came together organically based on interest level. The pitch that resonated most for me was work in subsaharan Africa to collect better data. After the pitch from Dr. Hari Iyer, I offered my services in UX to the team. We soon rounded out our group to include clinicians, an engineer, a nurse, and a biochemist.

The next step was to dive deeper into the problem and ascertain what the best course of action would be in presenting our solution to the entire group and judges.

Our Hackathon Team
Whiteboards and Post-its breaking down the problem

Intensive Group Workshopping

Before we could even begin to solve the problem of designing our solution, the team needed to level-set on the current problem was and where opportunities for improvement exist. Journey Mapping is the tool for that exact service and I led the team in stubbing out what the experience was like from both the patient and physicians perspective. Given that technology was limited in low income countries (our target demographic) we needed to understand each persona. Again using post-its, we created a crude Affinity diagram that captured the essence of what we were looking for. We also broke down the systems that are in play in dealing with healthcare in another region of the world, including how the National Cancer Registry works with hospital facilities and their communities.
Only when we had everything figured out could we start putting together the pieces of a first-draft plan. Our next step was to run our ideas by a mentor. Mentors are industry experts who shed light on aspects of the project the team may not have thought of. They can also help the team think through their hacking process should we need to pivot.

Final Presentation

Our final for what we would come to call Mobile Reg Onc was done in three parts: Problem definition, our solution, and how it’d be funded. Our presentation was required to be delivered in under 3 minutes. We led with having the audience imagine they were a hospital manager in Bangalore India in which the hospital serves 65 million people (roughly 300 patients a day). They’ve partnered with the National Cancer Registry, but unfortunately all of their data is on paper.

Luckily, inexpensive cellphones are pervasive in India. Enter our solution: Mobile Reg Onc. We then talked through how our solution would feed data to the existing Registry system, eliminate duplicate entries, and make things faster with low levels of training. It provides greater access, along with WHO approved data-points. We then moved onto the Business Model which included capturing data on the backend, then scaling progressively. It’d start at a local level, then move to a country level as it matures. We also touched on partnering strategically with organizations, getting research grants and additional funding from the data.

Presenting our final pitch to the audience
Hackathon group workshopping

Outcomes & Outreach

While are efforts didn’t garner any awards, it did lead to further opportunities through follow-up collaborations and Harvard grant proposals. The experience was such a positive one, not only did I bring it back to the team to share how we could improve our hackathons, but also addended another MIT Healthcare Hack held during SXSW a year later. The experience helped galvanize the value these events have in not only creating a collaborative community of cross-industry participants, but opening up with ideation process to a broad group of people.
From a company value perspective, it gave us direct access to our key users: Doctors, Nurses, and Clinicians. It also provided visibility to the organization as leaders in the industry and helped build university and hospital relationships beyond corporate contracts. Having a larger presence in the Healthcare community only benefits the organization. By providing positive associations with future investors it also builds strong potential for becoming a leader in innovative ideas.