This upcoming Friday and Saturday, we’ve got HackingHealth, the first event of its kind in Montreal. It’s presented as a hackathon, with the original recipe of gathering programmers for a day-long marathon, but with the additional of health professionals. Those professionals have been invited for the past weeks to submit ideas to improve healthcare, and the aim is to get prototypes to be showed at the end of the event.
The organizers, an eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, doctors, and programmers hope to mobilize both the vibrant startup community, as well as the medical/research community in Montreal. The McGill Centre for Biomedical innovation, the McGill faculty of medecine, Montreal InVivo, as well as other well known names such as RadialPoint, RealVentures, Github are also supporting the initiative.
It’s ambitious to have a hackathon for just a day, added to the fact there’s no focus on one single technology, plus there’s the additional challenge of prototyping medical applications. It’s a market well known for its conservatism, where tools are built in months and years instead of weeks or days. Established organizations scoff at young students or web entrepreneurs who want to change the rules of the industry, and as such, it’s still one the market where it’s better to raise substantial capital and an A+ team and board of advisors to hope to have success. There’s high hopes though for the HackingHealth: with the right actions and communication, one can hope that it will send a strong signal to the medical IT industry and open up minds, raising a new generation of health startups. After all, Montréal has McGill university, world-class research labs, as well as Udem and the other universities, and there’s no reason why can’t bring those assets to the vibrant startup community.
With already over 200+ health professionals, entrepreneurs, and programmers registered, you should also come to the hackathon, and see if you can also contribute to solve healthcare problems.
