Summary: On this episode of the Veteran’s Health Administration’s Innovation Ecosystem (VHA:IE) podcast, we focus on “hackathons”, which are events where students, engineers, and entrepreneurs get together to engage in programming, innovation, and an engineering challenges. This past year, the VA teamed up with GeorgeHacks to help veterans with some human-centered design challenges. Suzy Shirley, the Entrepreneur in Residence at the VHA Innovation Ecosystem, is this episode’s first guest. Suzy explains why hackathons are an unexplored mine full of potential and innovation. She also explains how you can take an everyday problem and give it to hundreds of students, entrepreneurs, engineers, and free-thinkers in order to solve the issue. The 2019 GeorgeHacks event brought people together and encouraged them to think outside the box and come together to solve a problem. Even with the enormous expertise within the VA system, they’re bound by the issues that limits VA healthcare. One of the ways they have overcome some of those issues is through the GeorgeHacks event, which paired the VA with MIT students. The second segment centers around Caitlyn Pratt who is the rising junior studying biomedical engineering at the George Washington University and is the new director of Georghacks at the George site. Georgehacks funds students to go to various hackathons in the DNB area. She talks about how she had the opportunity to chat with some of the veterans and people they help at hackathons and the most exciting results from some of the hackathons she participated in. Kayla Burkholder is pursuing a masters in product innovation at Virginia Commonwealth University and co-founded a company called Pocket Innovations LLC which aims to prevent pocket hematomas after pacemaker/ICD implantation. She also talks about being able to empower other individuals to work through the problems they see in their community. Next up we talked with Matthew Rowley, innovation specialist at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. He joined with the GeorgeHacks because, just as it is good for the VA in that it generates solutions and partnerships, it is also a great way to show the academic community that the VA values innovation. He shares an anecdote of a team that helped a veteran with a prosthesis. After that, we chatted with Brynn Cole director of programming for the VHA Innovators Network (or I-Net). They teamed up with Suzy Shirley’s VHA Innovation Ecosystem to pitch problems and come up with solutions during the GeorgeHack 2019 event. Lastly, Army Veteran Cathy Davis, and Lucile Lisle (a recreation therapist with the Recreation Service and Polytrauma program at the Washington DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center) talks with us about their experience with GeorgeHacks. Cathy talks about how she was able to talk to the students who wanted to help her solve her problems. Both Cathy and Lucile share their experiences working with VA hospitals and what they hope for in the future.
