Va:ie

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 o