“Hackathons—and the meaningful strategic partnerships they can spark—help the Veterans Affairs Department turn innovation that only seems imaginable into reality, a VA official said Tuesday.”
“At the Veteran Health Administration’s second annual Innovation Experience event in Washington, Suzanne Shirley, an entrepreneur-in-residence through the VHA’s Innovation Ecosystem, highlighted some of the impacts the solution-centered hacks have inspired over the last year…”
“… Hackathons, she explained, are fast-paced events or “design sprints,” that bring together hundreds of problem-solvers from diverse professional and academic backgrounds. Together, they form teams to solve specific challenges over the course of what usually spans just a few days.”
“The agency has led many individual hackathons over the years, but as EIR, Shirley helped launch a broader national initiative to partner with academic institutions and introduce VA-centered events in major cities across the nation…”
“VHA formed strategic partnerships with the universities and also engaged innovators, program leaders and partners throughout the agency to introduce the speedy, solution-driven events in new areas. The hackathons usually kick off by posing a variety of challenges for the teams to solve. Examples might be finding an alternative for an amputee veteran who wants to swim with their child but cannot use their prosthetics in the water, or storage options outside of backpacks, for veterans in wheelchairs who cannot reach around to grab their bags…”
“But the innovation hasn’t stopped at hackathons. Shirley said now that people are learning about the VA’s innovative drive, they are proactively reaching out to test their own emerging technology…” Read the full article here.
Source: How VA Gets Innovators to Focus on Veterans’ Challenges – By Brandi Vincent, October 23, 2019. Nextgov.
