Hey Health Techies!
If you've ever seen the word hackathon and immediately thought, "That sounds like something for software engineers," you're not alone.
I used to think the same thing.
But healthcare hackathons have become one of the best places for clinicians to experience how health technology is actually built—and you don't need to know how to code to contribute.
So in honor of the massive number of LinkedIn posts that I’ve seen about the Abridge x Anthropic x Lightspeed hackathon this past weekend (the FOMO is so real), I thought I’d breakdown what hackathons are and why they might be just the thing you need as clinician interested in how technology can fix real world problems.
So...what is a healthcare hackathon?
A healthcare hackathon is a time-boxed innovation event—usually lasting somewhere between 24 and 72 hours—where teams come together to solve a real healthcare problem.
The goal isn't to build a polished company or a perfect product. The goal is to move from problem → prototype as quickly as possible.
Teams are intentionally multidisciplinary. You'll often find clinicians, engineers, designers, product managers, and operations leaders all working together.
By the end of the day/weekend, every team presents what they built to a panel of judges. Sometimes it's a working AI tool. Sometimes it's a clickable prototype. Sometimes it's little more than a well-thought-out concept and a compelling presentation.
That's okay.
The real value isn't the finished product. It's learning how to tackle a problem together as a cross-functional group.
🤔 What actually happens?
Most hackathons follow a similar rhythm.
On Friday evening, people pitch problems that might be interesting to dig into.
Maybe a physician talks about spending hours documenting visits. Maybe a pharmacist describes the chaos of medication reconciliation. Maybe a nurse explains why patients keep calling with the same discharge questions.
Then if teams weren’t pre-assigned then they form based on what folks find interesting.
Saturday is spent refining the problem, brainstorming solutions, building prototypes, and getting feedback from mentors.
Sunday ends with team presentations and judging.
🤷🏻♀️ Do you need to know how to code to attend a hackathon?
No. Healthcare hackathons often actively recruit non-technical participants including clinicians because the engineers in the room can build almost anything but often need help thinking through the strategy of what's worth building.
This is the single biggest misconception keeping clinicians out of these rooms.
Every healthcare hackathon team needs someone who can answer "would anyone actually use this?" with authority instead of a guess. If you've worked a floor, run a clinic, verified an order, or explained a discharge plan to a confused family at 9pm, you are that person.
How to prepare for your first hackathon
Be open and ready to think in new ways. Be willing to share your experience and ideas.
Five things that make the weekend go better:
Bring a real problem, described narrowly. Not "medication adherence is bad." Try "our heart failure patients get discharged with seven new prescriptions and no one checks whether they filled them."
Practice your 60 second spiel out loud.
Skip the crash course. You don't need to learn Python before you go. Someone else likely has the technical skills that you lack. It’s called balance.
Join a team that's missing a clinician. They exist, they're usually the most eager to have you, and you'll contribute more than you would as the fourth person on a team that already has three.
Say the unglamorous thing. When the group gets excited about an idea that wouldn't survive, say so. That's the job. Doing it kindly and early is how you become the person everyone wants on their team next time.
A perfect example: the physician who beat the engineers
If you’ll recall, physician Michal Nedoszytko, MD, PhD, made big waves at Anthropic’s hackathon. Not because he was the strongest programmer in the room, but because he deeply understood a clinical problem worth solving.
That's becoming a recurring theme in healthcare AI. The limiting factor often isn't the model. It's knowing which problems actually matter, how care is delivered, and what a solution would look like in the real world.
Why should clinicians consider attending a hackathon?
A hackathon gives clinicians a low-cost, low-commitment sample of nonclinical work. Here's what you actually walk out with:
You find out if you like this work
Certificate programs cost thousands of dollars and months of evenings. A hackathon costs a weekend and sometimes a $25 registration fee.
The vocabulary stops being scary
You'll hear MVP (minimum viable product), user story, wireframe, sprint, and product-market fit used in context, by people using them to get work done rather than to sound smart. Terms you've been nodding along to on LinkedIn become things you understand from the inside.
You meet people you'd likely never reach through cold outreach
Two days in a room with engineers, designers, founders, and investors compresses months of networking into a weekend. And you're not asking anyone for anything — you're building something together, which builds a level of trust and comraderie that’s hard to match.
You get a story that’s more than just a bullet point
"Formed a team with two engineers and built a prototype for medication reconciliation at discharge" is a specific, concrete thing you can put on a resume and talk about in an interview. It signals initiative and collaboration outside your lane. Hiring managers in health tech notice it because most clinical resumes don't have anything like it.
It makes you better at your current job
This part gets massively undervalued. Hackathons teach you to separate a problem from a solution, to ask who benefits, to prototype before committing. Those habits transfer directly to quality improvement work, EHR optimization committees, workflow redesign, and every meeting where someone announces a new tool is coming next month.
You stop being the person a rollout happens to. You become the person asking why it's designed that way and becoming more interested in the implementation.
It's a reminder that you're a builder and a creative
Clinical work runs on protocols for good reason. But years of following pathways can make you forget you're capable of designing them and thinking outside the box. A weekend of "what if we just made this thing" is a surprisingly effective antidote to the flattened feeling a lot of clinicians describe and can't quite name.
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Until next time,
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