This April I had the opportunity to put my coursework to the test at the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab’s annual worldwide hackathon.
Over two days, my team developed orAIti, a patient-facing LLM-driven triage tool, along with a business model with bidirectional benefits. It would equip patients to start their care journeys with confidence while reducing unnecessary ER utilization. Our model would be accessible through well-matched NGO partners, providers, and insurers, giving their users a more reliable triage tool than commonly-relied-upon alternatives.
My first hackathon was an exciting trial-by-fire in understanding how product development happens in this space. With each round of mentor feedback, our project evolved and pivoted rapidly. Keeping the patient experience at the core, especially for those with lower health literacy, proved challenging while balancing all the considerations that go into generating viable health tools. We succeeded in centering patient needs in our value proposition, which led us to win the Coup de Coeur award.
Thank you to Antoine Chesnais for bringing your expertise in model architecture, prototype-building, and patient-centered drive, to Lorena Gómez Acosta and Mélissa Laine for your market research, prototype collaboration, and pitch-building excellence, and to Caitlin Chesnais-Dixon for your wealth of industry and model-building knowledge, the most legendary business-model brainstorming session, and for cultivating the creative seed for this entire opportunity.
And thanks to the organizers, judges, and all the excellent mentors who helped us carve our project along the way.