Cognitive team members entered and mentored in MIT’s Hacking Medicine Grand Hack, scoring second place in the hackathon-wide InterSystems challenge for solutions in data and technology. The annual Grand Hack brings innovators to Boston for the weekend to develop answers to prescient medical questions.

Doctors spend an average of twelve minutes with their patients. They may spend much longer getting each patient’s medical records.[1] This time disparity drove Cognitive Consultant Monica Molina and her team at the MIT Hacking Medicine Grand Hack to develop a record-sharing database to streamline the process and minimize physician burden.

Molina and her team came together after a day of pitching, coordinating, and developing ideas. In under 24 hours, they researched and built a prototype of the product they would later call “Carecierge,” which Molina describes as a system built “to facilitate efficient transfer of patient records across different hospital systems both nationally and globally.” For Molina, viability was paramount: “A solution should be both possible and practical because, otherwise, it doesn’t solve the problem.” More than that, she aspired to have a product that reduced the unnecessary strain and medical waste of repeating medical tests. As she explains, “Patients might have multiple records from multiple places, and it’s a huge hassle to get those.”

These considerations led Molina’s team to a second-place finish in the Grand Hack’s InterSystems challenge, a hackathon-wide objective specific to teams using the sponsor’s data or technology. Reflecting on her experience, Molina says: “It emphasized the importance of a multidisciplinary team which works smoothly together and can provide a lot of different insights.” She intends to take the knowledge she gained to reenter the Grand Hack in 2023.

Previous winner and Cognitive Senior Consultant Yuna Lee entered the Grand Hack as a mentor this year, experiencing it from a new angle.