Bridging the gap between doctors and hackers to upgrade health care
Among some computer geeks, it’s the Hacker Way: A loose model for rapidly solving problems through intense, inexpensive jam sessions among software programmers and web designers, with little planning and total freedom.
Mark Zuckerberg used the term to describe how his collaborators and employees refined Facebook with thousands of small improvements and turned it from a dorm-room project into a $100-billion corporate giant.
A small group of Montreal hackers and medical professionals will launch an experiment next weekend to test the Hacker Way against one of the most intractable, hidebound systems going: Canadian health care. These hackers won’t be the rogues remembered from the 1980s for busting into secret databases, installing viruses or stealing nuclear codes in movies. Instead, about 180 web designers, software writers and other IT experts will meet about 50 doctors, nurses and researchers to try to produce simple health-care applications that could lead to bigger innovations.
