What Is a Hackathon?
- Jul 31
- 8 min read
In our online physician communities, we often hear the same frustrations on repeat: too much documentation, workflows that don't make sense, and things that seem more complicated than they need to be. Most doctors have a running list of things they'd fix about healthcare if someone just handed them the keys. These days, thankfully, it’s becoming easier for physicians to be part of creating solutions. For those physicians looking to innovate, hackathons can be a great place to dive into the space. Below, we’ll delve into what hackathons are, how they work, and who should think about going to one.
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What is a hackathon?
Hackathons originally came out of the software world. These are intense time limited events (usually a few days) where people come together to solve problems and innovate. Typically, there are people from many different backgrounds and expertise, including engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, researchers, and others, who collaborate on ideas and solutions.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the word hack may cause confusion. Nobody’s hacking into anything; it's more just "hacking together" a solution before the clock runs out. The ‘thon’ comes from marathon, because that’s how it feels.
There’s often a competitive aspect to these hackathons. Usually, they are sponsored by a company or investors in the space. Teams come to or are formed at the event, and they compete to try and create solutions. These solutions can be to a common prompt or set of problems, or be open. There’s usually mentorship available at the event to help teams overcome hurdles or provide guidance. At the end, teams have an opportunity to present what they’ve spun up, and usually there’s a panel of judges that determine winners who either get a prize, funding, job offers, or other chances to make their solutions realty by the sponsors of the event. This competitive aspect usually keeps the energy level very high.
As an added bonus, hackathons are not just productive, but also fun and offer great opportunities to network with others in the space.
Recently, hackathons have become popular in the healthcare innovation space, and what’s exciting is that they’re often involving clinicians.
What is the basic flow of a hackathon, and what is the end result?
Hackathons are fast by design. You pick a problem, you sketch something rough, and by the end of the event, you're pitching it to a room.
A typical event looks something like this:
Someone pitches a problem
People find or join a team
The team throws around potential ideas until one sticks
Something gets built (likely a proof of concept or a working prototype)
Mentors wander around offering advice
Teams pitch to a panel of judges
Remember, nobody walks in expecting that teams will produce a completely finished product. You just need to show the idea is worth building further. A surprising number of real healthcare companies started life as a hackathon project that someone kept working on after the event ended.
Why are physicians essential at healthcare hackathons?
As we all know, problems in healthcare are messy, and solving them requires actually understanding the system. A lot of healthcare products get built by smart people who've never actually worked in healthcare, and it shows. What looks great on a pitch deck or works in a lab may not translate intro reality and workflows well. Or worse, these solutions may be bad for patient care or violate regulatory guidelines or HIPAA.
This is where physicians and other clinicians are a critical piece of the equation - they bring lived experience to the table. They know what ideas need to be fixed, as well as the barriers to solving them. They also tend to catch these problems before they become expensive ones. This is because they understand things such as:
Clinical workflows
Patient safety concerns
Regulatory realities
Documentation requirements
Pain points
What actually moves the needle with patient outcomes
What physicians don’t typically have is technical and entrepreneurial expertise. Matching all of these skill sets is where the magic happens at hackathons, and where real world solutions are built.
How hackathons typically work in healthcare
Step 1: Problem identification
People pitch problems they've actually run into (every clinician could probably name some ideas they’d want solved in their sleep!). While there’s lots of big problems in healthcare, teams will want to pick ideas that they can address in a shorter period of time, or where they can create some sort of model or working prototype. Because of this, problems are often point solutions or features, rather than large theoretical issues. The more concrete, the better. You can always include in your presentation how this is just the start of solving a bigger problem. Common starting points for problems you’d want to solve often include realms such as:
Excessive administrative burden
Documentation inefficiencies
Diagnostic delays
Patient communication issues
Medical education challenges
AI workflow integration
Rural healthcare access
Care coordination
Step 2: Team formation
Once the problems are on the table, people drift toward whichever one speaks to them or that they feel they can contribute the most to. A team could end up with a combination of:
Physicians, other healthcare clinicians, or trainees
Software engineers
UX designers
Product managers
Entrepreneurs
Data scientists
MBA students
Step 3: Rapid development
Over the next day or two, teams try to get to the beginnings of a real solution. They may create a wireframe, a working prototype or mockup, business plans, demos, or other things that bring their idea to life - at least to a basic level where taking it across the finish line seems possible.
Mentors circulate the event space and weigh in on whatever issues a team is stuck on to help move things along. They could help with clinical questions, business strategy, engineering, fundraising, or regulatory questions.
Step 4: Final presentations
Every team gets in front of judges. Judges will usually evaluate on the basis of:
Clinical impact
Innovation
Feasibility
Market potential
Patient benefit
Team execution
Some events hand out prize money, investments, a spot in an incubator, offers of employment, mentorship, or investor intros.
Who should participate, and can physicians participate if they don’t have coding experience?
Many physicians assume hackathons are for the entrepreneurial types, or the ones with a technical background already. That's not really true. These events welcome doctors at every stage.
You genuinely don't need to write code. Plenty of winning teams never had a physician touch a keyboard. Instead, the doctor on the team is usually the one:
Identifying problems worth solving
Validating clinical workflows
Explaining patient care processes
Evaluating feasibility
Providing medical expertise
Helping teams navigate regulatory considerations
Presenting the solution
Benefits of participating in physician hackathons
Expand your professional network
Hackathons bring together people you may never meet through traditional medicine. You may connect with fellow entrepreneurial or like-minded physicians, startup founders, venture capitalists, engineers, designers, investors, healthcare executives, and academic innovators. A lot of long-term professional relationships trace back to a random conversation at a hackathon.
Learn about innovation
Participating in hackathons exposes physicians to product development, user-centered design, startup strategy, regulatory pathways, intellectual property, business models, healthcare technology, and much more. These skills are useful even if you never start a company.
Explore career opportunities
Hackathons frequently introduce physicians to careers in medical consulting, clinical informatics, digital health, medical device development, venture capital, startup advising, and product management. Physicians can discover entirely new career paths through these events. Or, even more ambitiously, they may become physician founders and build their own companies.
Build something meaningful that addresses your pain points
Perhaps the greatest benefit is the opportunity to transform everyday frustrations into actionable solutions. Rather than simply complaining about healthcare problems, physicians can actively participate in solving them.
How to prepare for your first physician hackathon
If you're attending your first hackathon event, preparation can make a big difference. To help prepare you, first consider these strategies:
Come with problems, not products: Instead of arriving with a fully formed startup idea, bring a list of real clinical frustrations you've observed. The best projects almost always start from a real frustration, not a polished startup idea someone workshopped in advance.
Stay open-minded: Your original idea may evolve dramatically as teammates contribute different perspectives. Flexibility often produces better outcomes; that's a sign things are working.
Focus on patients: The strongest projects improve patient care, physician workflow, or healthcare efficiency. Keeping patients (or in hackathon speak, “end users”) at the center of development leads to more impactful solutions.
Network generously: Take advantage of opportunities to meet mentors, judges, and fellow participants. Some of the best conversations happen in the hallway, not during the sessions.
Follow up after the event: If your team develops a promising concept, schedule follow-up meetings after the hackathon. Some projects naturally conclude after the event, while others turn into something real, but only if somebody actually follows up.
Where physicians can find hackathons
There are more of these than most physicians realize. Academic medical centers, medical schools, universities, innovation institutes, health systems, startup accelerators, specialty societies, and digital health conferences all run hackathons, challenges, and design sprints fairly regularly.
Obviously, you can search online for hackathons, but try and be intentional about which ones you think will provide you value. If you know that there are institutions that regularly are building in healthcare, such as Stanford or MIT, look at their events calendar. It's also worth checking your local university's innovation center, your hospital's innovation office, regional incubators, or your specialty society. You may be surprised how much is going on in your own backyard.
Related PSG resource: Several of our partners host hackathons, and some of our in person events may have these as well. Want to stay informed about upcoming hackathons we think you should consider attending? Sign up for PSG's weekly newsletter to get the latest opportunities and events delivered to your inbox.
Conclusion
Hackathons in healthcare sit at a unique but incredibly interesting intersection of medicine, technology, and entrepreneurship. They give doctors a chance to stop just naming what's broken in healthcare and to actually spend a concentrated period of time trying to fix a piece of it, alongside people who think about problems very differently than they do. You don't need coding experience or a startup background to make an impact here. Your clinical judgment and your firsthand read on patient care are usually the most valuable things in the room. Additionally, even if you don’t win, you’ll likely come out of the event with more understanding of the ecosystem, a larger network of like minded individuals, and a lot of ideas you can continue to expand upon outside of the hackathon environment.
Related resources for physicians interested in health innovation
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