Stimulating innovation through the hackathon concept in paediatrics: our experience at the Aga Khan University

International Hackathon as a Tool to Augment Education, Collaboration, and Innovation in Global Neurosurgery

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Health care providers' exposure to global surgical disparities is limited in current nursing and/or medical school curricula. For instance, global health is often associated with infectious diseases or maternal health without acknowledging the growing need for surgical care in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We propose an international virtual hackathon based on neurosurgical patient cases in under-resourced settings as an educational tool to bring awareness to global surgical disparities and develop relationships among trainees in different countries.

METHODS

Participants were recruited through email listservs, a social media campaign, and prize offerings. A 3-day virtual hackathon event was administered, which included workshops, mentorship, keynote panels, and pitch presentations to judges. Participants were presented with real patient cases and directed to solve a barrier to their care. Surveys assessed participants' backgrounds and event experience. The hackathon was executed through Zoom at Harvard Innovation Lab in Boston, MA, on March 25 to 27, 2022. Participants included medical students, with additional participants from business, engineering, or current health care workers.

RESULTS

Three hundred seven applications were submitted for 100 spots. Participants included medical students, physicians, nurses, engineers, entrepreneurs, and undergraduates representing 25 countries and 82 cities. Fifty-one participants previously met a neurosurgeon, while 39 previously met a global health expert, with no difference between LMIC and high-income countries' respondents. Teams spent an average of 2.75 hours working with mentors, and 88% of postevent respondents said the event was "very" or "extremely conducive" to networking. Projects fell into 4 categories: access, language barriers, education and training, and resources. The winning team, which was interdisciplinary and international, developed an application that analyzes patient anatomy while performing physical therapy to facilitate remote care and clinical decision-making.

CONCLUSION

An international virtual hackathon can be an educational tool to increase innovative ideas to address surgical disparities in LMICs and establish early collaborative relationships with medical trainees from different countries.

Designathons in health research: a global systematic review

INTRODUCTION

A designathon is a three-stage participatory activity informed by design thinking. There is a growing literature on designathons in health. This study synthesised designathons' effectiveness and implementation-related factors to address health challenges.

METHODS

We searched Cochrane Library, Embase, PubMed, Scopus and the ClinicalTrials.gov registry for articles containing primary data on designathons for health from their dates of inception to 29 November 2022. We retrieved additional studies from citation searching and a complementary open call. We synthesised data on designathons' effectiveness (ie, engagement, outputs and implementation), required resources and implementation-related factors (ie, resources, facilitators, barriers, strengths and limitations). We assessed the risk of bias using a checklist adapted from Joanna Briggs Institute Critical Appraisal tools.

RESULTS

In total, 4973 citations were identified, and 42 studies were included. In total, 26 studies (62%) were from high-income countries. The median number of total participants was 49, divided into a median of 8 teams. The duration of the intensive collaboration phase ranged from 3 hours to 7 days. Common evaluation criteria were feasibility, innovation and impact. Idea and prototype outputs included mobile phone applications, educational programmes and medical devices. Interventions developed from a designathon was estimated to be highly cost-effective. The most common facilitators were interdisciplinary participants and high-quality mentorship. The most common barriers were suboptimal execution of the events, difficulties in balancing interdisciplinary participants across teams and limited support for participants along the process. There were limited data on required resources and further implementation of solutions after designathons.

CONCLUSION

Given designathons' adaptability in terms of budget, mode of delivery, type of output and involvement of diverse participants, including end users, designathons can be implemented in a wide range of contexts to address various health issues.

PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER

CRD42023389685.

Interdisciplinary Online Hackathons as an Approach to Combat the COVID-19 Pandemic: Case Study

Background

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected the lives of millions of people by causing a dramatic impact on many health care systems and the global economy. This devastating pandemic has brought together communities across the globe to work on this issue in an unprecedented manner.

Objective

This case study describes the steps and methods employed in the conduction of a remote online health hackathon centered on challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to deliver a clear implementation road map for other organizations to follow.

Methods

This 4-day hackathon was conducted in April 2020, based on six COVID-19–related challenges defined by frontline clinicians and researchers from various disciplines. An online survey was structured to assess: (1) individual experience satisfaction, (2) level of interprofessional skills exchange, (3) maturity of the projects realized, and (4) overall quality of the event. At the end of the event, participants were invited to take part in an online survey with 17 (+5 optional) items, including multiple-choice and open-ended questions that assessed their experience regarding the remote nature of the event and their individual project, interprofessional skills exchange, and their confidence in working on a digital health project before and after the hackathon. Mentors, who guided the participants through the event, also provided feedback to the organizers through an online survey.

Results

A total of 48 participants and 52 mentors based in 8 different countries participated and developed 14 projects. A total of 75 mentorship video sessions were held. Participants reported increased confidence in starting a digital health venture or a research project after successfully participating in the hackathon, and stated that they were likely to continue working on their projects. Of the participants who provided feedback, 60% (n=18) would not have started their project without this particular hackathon and indicated that the hackathon encouraged and enabled them to progress faster, for example, by building interdisciplinary teams, gaining new insights and feedback provided by their mentors, and creating a functional prototype.

Conclusions

This study provides insights into how online hackathons can contribute to solving the challenges and effects of a pandemic in several regions of the world. The online format fosters team diversity, increases cross-regional collaboration, and can be executed much faster and at lower costs compared to in-person events. Results on preparation, organization, and evaluation of this online hackathon are useful for other institutions and initiatives that are willing to introduce similar event formats in the fight against COVID-19.

Healthcare hackathons: fostering medical education through innovation in a developing country: a case study from Pakistan

Background

Hackathons aim to develop solutions to preidentified problem domains and catalyse startup cultures. Recently, the teaching and learning potential of hackathons has also been documented. In this study, we make the case for utilisation of hackathons as an alternative teaching and learning tool geared towards entrepreneurship and as an opportunity for interprofessional integration.

Methods

This research study followed up with participants from the third hackathon at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. Hack MedEd was about solutions to problems of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education with an emphasis on low-income to middle-income countries. Participant evaluation data were filled at the end of the hackathon and gathered from three focused group discussions (FGDs): immediately before and after the event, a delayed follow-up after 11 months was recorded.

Results

Of 116 participants, the majority (71%) were under 30 years old, and over half were female. The evaluations provided by hackers were positive overall with a mean score of 4.37 out of 5 on a Likert Scale. During the FGDs, participants spoke positively of the process and felt that, by the end of the hackathon, they had learnt something new. In the delayed follow-up FGD, teams that had undergone incubation expressed that they had gained a critical and simple skillset that they might not have acquired otherwise.

Conclusion

Hackathons business incubation programmes may be considered an alternative teaching and learning tool—especially for individuals studying or working within the healthcare discipline within low-resource settings.

Novel Approaches to Teaching Aging and Disability: Active Learning Through Design and Exploration

Active learning emphasizes student engagement and collaboration instead of more passive learning, which involves primarily listening to lectures in the classroom setting. The benefits of active learning are many with an emphasis on the expansion of higher-order processing and critical thinking skills. Active learning can be found in many best practice approaches in the Medicine, Science, Engineering, and Mathematics (MSTEM) fields. Hack-a-thon and hack events are examples of active learning. These are gaining popularity in research institutes, and specifically in engineering, computer science, business, and healthcare settings. Wikipedia defines hack-a-thon as the blending of the words "hack," referring to exploratory programming, and "marathon," referring to a timed event. This article describes a hack-a-thon approach for active learning in the classroom setting.

Clinical emergency care research in low-income and middle-income countries: opportunities and challenges

Disease processes that frequently require emergency care constitute approximately 50% of the total disease burden in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). Many LMICs continue to deal with emergencies caused by communicable disease states such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and meningitis, while also experiencing a marked increase in non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus and trauma. For many of these states, emergency care interventions have been developed through research in high-income countries (HICs) and advances in care have been achieved. However, in LMICs, clinical research, especially interventional trials, in emergency care are rare. Furthermore, there exists minimal research on the emergency management of diseases, which are rarely encountered in HICs but impact the majority of LMIC populations. This paper explores challenges in conducting clinical research in patients with emergency conditions in LMICs, identifies examples of successful clinical research and highlights the system, individual and study design characteristics that made such research possible in LMICs. Derived from the available literature, a focused list of high impact research considerations are put forth.