My Experience at MIT Grand Hack 2018

I am deeply interested in solving healthcare related problems using the advances in technology and so I knew applying for MIT Grand Hack which is the largest healthcare hackathon held at MIT Media Labs would provide me a great platform to explore this. Application to this hackathon involved filling out the google doc which had a few questionnaire like briefly explaining your skills, projects, ideas etc. They were sending out the results on a rolling basis so it’s good to apply for it as early as possible. I was selected for it and got notified a month prior to the hackathon that was held on 13-15 April, leaving me with enough time for visa applications and other bookings. 

I reached Boston two days before the event so I had enough time to explore the MIT and Harvard campus and experience how the student life there is. The campus was beautiful, situated across the Charles river and full of students always busy doing something or the other. 

On 12th evening a pre-hack event was organised in the Beautiful Seaport district of Boston at Continuum Design centre so that all the participants get to network with each other and meet few of the mentors and discuss various ideas. I was amazed to see people from varied backgrounds like medical, pharma, business, computer science, mechanical engineering, academia etc and also of a wide age group right from high schoolers to retired gentlemen. 

Next day in the evening the event started. There were two tracks one was of Global health and the other of Connected Health. I was placed in the connected health track. There were few great keynote speakers from many Boston based healthcare startups and firms. There were also inspirational doctors addressing all the participants. 

It all started with the idea pitching and team formation session wherein anyone who had an idea could come up and pitch it and the others can see which idea they like and want to work for. I in particular liked the idea that Mike pitched that was about trying to structure the unstructured clinical trial data. During the team formation and networking session where people just roamed around discussing and trying to find a right team, I realized I wanted to work for Mike's idea more than anyone else's idea. We finally had our team with me being the only undergrad student with almost no experience and the others Mike, Amy, Raymond, Suhas and Rahul all pretty much experienced in their fields. One very good thing about our team was the diversity with people being from software, data science, pharma, and managerial backgrounds. 

Over the weekend with a lot of brainstorming sessions within the team as well as with a lot of mentors, working on the technicalities and the business model for the idea and finally shaping the idea perfectly for the final pitching session I genuinely learnt a lot. It is always great to be in a team with a lot of experienced members and the best part being all of them so down to earth. Honestly I might not have contributed really to the ideation but I learned a lot looking at the idea from a fresher's eye. Totally grateful to my entire team. 

Giving a brief of the idea, TRIAL CONNECT that is our project name is a platform that would quickly match the right patient to the right trial. Because if you see, a clinical trial has a lot of inclusion and exclusion criteria and all of these information being very unstructured makes it difficult and a lengthy process to find the right set of patients for conducting the trial. In the US all the trials need to be registered with the clinicaltrial.gov so that becomes the database for all the trials for us, and the patient data comes from the EHR/EMR systems. Using Natural language processing and Machine learning algorithms Trial connect plays the role of an interface between both the databases and fetches the best match as a result. There is more to this idea but all in all it is a solution that provides value to multiple stakeholders like patients, physicians, EMR companies, CROs (Contract Research Organisation) and the pharma companies. 

And guess what? We did win the theme prize of 500$ at the end. Happy happy :) 

Mike and Amy really did amazing during the final pitching session and Amy made the presentation like a professional, I mean these soft skills are just so important and plays the key role to the winning. Something that is now Noted in my mind. 

At the end I'd just say anyone who gets this opportunity, make the best of it and whatever it is its always going be to a nice experience meeting and interacting with so many people and who would anyway want to miss the opportunity of visiting MIT and the beautiful city of Boston to which I am already in love with. 

Thanks for reading :)