HL20: Andrea Ippolito—Hacking Healthcare

In our annual HealthLeaders 20, we profile individuals who are changing healthcare for the better. Some are longtime industry fixtures; others would clearly be considered outsiders. Some are revered; others would not win many popularity contests. They are making a difference in healthcare. This is the story of Andrea Ippolito.

This profile was published in the December, 2014 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.

"We have doctors who said they didn't think of themselves as entrepreneurs going back to their own organizations and deploying their own hackathons."

A few blocks from the main hall of the South by Southwest Interactive festival on a sunny March morning, a healthcare hackathon is in progress.

Having attended more than a dozen such gatherings, Andrea Katherine Ippolito, a biomedical engineer by training, can rattle off a long list of companies spawned at one of MIT's previous Hacking Medicine events—a list that includes Pillpack, Smart Scheduling, Podimetrics, RubiconMD, Twiage, Eagle Health Supplies, and HermesIQ.

Ippolito is a PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hacking Medicine's codirector for 2013–2014 (along with fellow MIT student Allison Yost), and now a Presidential Innovation Fellow working with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Structured as a student organization out of MIT's Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Hacking Medicine is the ultimate healthcare hackathon roadshow. So far, the tour has touched down in four different continents (with events in North America, Europe, Uganda, and India) with more than a dozen hackathons and more than 300 teams formed from them.

"The first year we existed, we had two hackathons," Ippolito says. "The second year, we had three. This last year we have 11, and next year we are slated to be working on at least 17, and those are the ones that we're going to be working on directly with people." That number doesn't count those who learn the ropes at Hacking Medicine's events and then peel off to do their own hackathons, she says. "I'm going over to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement today to explain what a hackathon is and how they can use it in their Innovation Relay, which starts today," Ippolito says.

The hackathons usually start on a Friday evening and run for 48 hours. The first evening, participants socialize and get inspired by a guest speaker on problems healthcare faces and how teams might be able to form to solve them. Saturday morning, participants pitch their ideas for 60 seconds, focusing on a healthcare problem or pain point they want to tackle in the remaining 36 hours. Based off those pitches, participants form teams and the hacking begins.

"They start to brainstorm and develop and iterate a solution," Ippolito says. "We then arm them with mentors, and by the end of the 48 hours, they demo what they came up with." The demo deliverables range from prototypes, or paper wireframes, to hardware hacks using small Raspberry Pi or Arduino computers—even objects created with 3-D printers.

"We have doctors who said they didn't think of themselves as entrepreneurs going back to their own organizations and deploying their own hackathons," Ippolito says. "It's this 'see one, do one, teach one' model."

In February 2012, one MIT hackathon even spawned a company with Ippolito on the team. "It's called Smart Scheduling," she says. "We predict no-shows in medical practices." A month after the hackathon, Hacking Medicine cofounder and faculty advisor Zen Chu (who is also entrepreneur-in-residence at the Martin Center) introduced the Smart Scheduling team to athenahealth executive vice president and COO Ed Park (brother of Todd Park, who until recently was the U.S. government's CTO). That was the start of Smart Scheduling's integration into More Disruption Please, athenahealth's incubator program for partner companies that plug into athenahealth's network of more than 50,000 providers, Ippolito says.

With all the high-tech thinking surrounding Hacking Medicine, it's worth noting that a single paper page plays an important role: the Business Model Canvas, developed by Alex Osterwalder, author of the bestseller Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. (Osterwalder's Twitter self-description concludes: "Won't rest until senior executives and entrepreneurs operate like surgeons!") The Canvas helps health hackers get right to some key elements that will determine whether their startup could succeed—such as financing or identifying the right partnerships.

Ippolito's faculty advisors developed what she calls the junior varsity version of the Business Model Canvas, a simplified version that lets hackers use the single page to identify different stakeholders.

"While hackathons can't be applied in benchtop science all the time, it brings together diverse stakeholders and encourages them to seek feedback early and often, and validate their hypothesis developed at the hackathon to ensure that they're going in the right direction," Ippolito says. "That's really revolutionary."