From Kawinthi, our Executive Vice President:
This weekend I had the amazing opportunity to attend Boston Children’s Hacking Pediatrics hackathon. In collaboration with MIT’s Hacking Medicine, the two and a half day conference gave everyone, from undergraduates to field experts, the opportunity to hack the key issues (pain-points) that surround pediatric care today. The first morning all participants were invited to pitch a pain point or innovative idea. Thirty-seven 1-minute pitches were given on an array of topics. We then were given a half hour to talk to the pitch-ers and form teams. I joined a group that wanted to better manage the EKG wires that hang and tangle themselves on restless peds patients. After 3-4 hours of hacking, and coming up with some solid wireless/bluetooth-related ideas, we hit a breaking point when realizing we really couldn’t make a proto-type, or hash out the functional details of our idea without an electrical engineer on the team. 4 hours in, we decided to pivot. Our final idea resolved the issues of complex pediatric patients needing multiple oral medications, multiple times a day, once discharged. We also thumbed through literature that stated up to 60% of pediatric care-takers measure dosages incorrectly. After hours of designing and running through potential business models, we developed a proto-type of our product Squirt, which would be one piece of our comprehensive solution to at-home oral administration, “Squirt for Squirts”.
Hacking Pediatrics provided all teams with access to thousands of Legos, a few 3-D printers, LittleBits electrical kits, dozens of APIs, and enough food to energize the marathon-hacker. What’s more, they had “Mentors” walking around to each group who stemmed from any expert-field you could imagine- clinicians, engineers, Apple developers, entrepreneurs, architects… we had a lot of knowledge at our disposal. Final presentations took place Sunday afternoon, and every team had something great to offer, some developed fully-functioning apps, one team created a motion-sensored video game, others developed medical device prototypes… the list goes on. All in all, I networked with some amazing individuals pioneering the field of innovative healthtech, and was able to apply and contribute my knowledge of cost-structures, value chains, and business models to help my team of 2 clinicians and 2 engineers bring an idea to life. What really topped off the weekend however… after all the presentations took place, a Senior Partner at Pure Tech Venture Capital approached our group, and asked if we’d like to meet to further discuss the potential of our product.
Stay tuned to hear more on that later!