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This inaugural hack-a-thon is being organized in partnership with Glocal Healthcare and hosted by GE Healthcare India.

“The Jugaad-a-thon is a new way of elevating the experience and know-how of local experts, and using strategies from not just engineering, but also public health and business, to develop new tools to improve health,” said Elizabeth Bailey, Director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Global Health.

“We’re focused on finding impactful, marketable, and innovative ways to provide care to women and children in India,” she said.

CAMTech INDIA’s inaugural Jugaad-a-thon (derived from the Hindi word jugaad meaning an innovative fix or work-around) will be a 48-hour event where 250 clinicians, engineers and entrepreneurs collaborate on disruptive, new solutions for unsolved clinical problems.

Cross-disciplinary teams addressing specific clinical challenges will work late into the night to develop functional prototypes and explore new business models to commercialize their innovations.

Teams present their innovations to a panel of judges at the end of the event, and will be awarded a variety of prizes to help take their innovations forward.

Applications for the July 18-20 Jugaad-a-thon are due by July 7.