JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Innovation and entrepreneurship training are increasingly recognized as important in medical education. However, lack of faculty comfort with instruction of these concepts has limited the implementation of curricula focused on these skills. Furthermore, this lack of familiarity limits the inclusion of practicing physicians in healthcare innovation, where their experience is valuable. Hackathons are intense innovation competitions that use gamification principles to increase comfort with creative thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal collaboration, but they require further exploration in medical innovation.

Objective:

To address this, we aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a healthcare hackathon with 2 main goals: To improve emergency physician familiarity with the principles of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship and to develop innovative solutions to 3 discrete problems facing emergency medicine physicians and patients.

Methods:

We used previously described practices for conducting hackathons to develop and implement of our hackathon (HackED!). We partnered with the American College of Emergency Physicians, the Stanford School of Biodesign, and the Stanford Institute of Design to lend institutional support and expertise in healthcare innovation to our event. We determined a location, timeframe, and logistics for the competition and settled on three use cases for teams to work on. We planned to explore the learning experience of participants within a pragmatic paradigm and complete an abductive thematic analysis using data from a variety of sources.

Results:

HackED! took place from October 1-3, 2022. 3 teams developed novel solutions to each of the use cases. Our investigation into the educational experience of participants suggested the event was valuable and uncovered themes suggesting that the learning experience could be understood within a framework from entrepreneurship education not previously described in relation to hackathons.

Conclusions:

Healthcare hackathons appear to be a viable method of increasing physician experience with innovation and entrepreneurship principles and addressing complex problems in healthcare. They should be considered as part of educational programs that focus on these concepts.