From Boston’s Hackathons to UNLEASH Lab in Denmark: Together We Impact The World!
I am honored to be selected to participate in the first UNLEASH Lab with 1000 talents from 129 countries. I am proudly representing Saudi Arabia in this first UNLEASH cohort to co-create solutions for the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs). We will be divided into different teams and will work on seven major themes including, Education and ICT, Energy, Food, Health, Sustainable Consumption & Production, Urban Sustainability, and Water.
My name is Alaa Qari from the beautiful coastal city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. I graduated as a general dentist from King Abdulaziz University in 2011, and have joined the faculty at Umm Al-Qura University in Makkah in the Department of Preventive Dentistry, Division of Dental Public Health. I am currently pursuing my doctoral studies in Dental Public Health at Boston University, USA. Ever since I was an undergrad I have been active on different venues, where I am known as Active Dentist. You can follow me on social media platforms, Twitter: @DrAlaaQari and Snapchat: ActiveDentist.
As a dentist with a public health and user experience design perspectives, I will focus on the health theme with emphasis on prevention and improving access to oral health care. Traditional health care is costly, and worldwide attempts to address this problem include shifting to more value-based care for populations to achieve better health and wellbeing. Saudi Arabia’s new Model of Care is shifting the health care system paradigm from cure to prevention. One of the core means my country is focusing on is e-health to achieve better health outcomes. Saudi Arabia is working on activating a national health record for all citizens. It is also developing the capacity for telehealth to be able to provide the same quality of care for all its residents across the kingdom.
Since I have started my academic journey in Boston, the hub of digital health innovation, I have been an explorer in this area. Digging into digital health opportunities and learning about their potential to solve problems in the healthcare field. This has become a primary area of focus for me, especially teledentistry, which is a telecommunication technology that exchanges dental information and images over distant places to provide care, consultations, referral, and education. All my extracurricular experiences have lead me to my passion in public health.
I have joined different health events which introduced me to hackathon competitions. These challenges allow individuals from a diverse backgrounds to team up and co-create solutions to solve specific problems in any field. Initially, I attended general hackathons to familiarize myself with the process. Then I moved on to more specific, health-related hackathons where I have pitched problems addressing my field of dentistry. One of the amazing aspects about a hackathon is the diversity of backgrounds you can find in one team. In one of my teams there was a patient, user experience expert, business person, architect, and health professionals. The collaborative work and collective thoughts strengthened the design thinking process, and we were able to define and strategically solve challenges for our communities. Since some members of my team, and I, possess strong knowledge and skills in Human-Centered Design process from a course/workshop by IDEO, we walked the patient journey and designed a prototype for our idea, benefiting from the diverse technical talents of our team. The beauty of hackathons is the valuable feedback you get from mentors and competition judges, allowing us to learn from their expertise. I especially find the environment of hackathons very rich and rewarding in helping me address my vision of public health innovation to disrupt the status quo in my country. It is the push button to get you to think outside the box and learn from different fields and contexts. However, what matters is the hard work after the hackathon to test the prototypes and ideas that your team has designed, and to turn them into reality.
How a challenge is organized, and who the sponsors are can accelerate the hacking process and speeds investment into promising projects. One hackathon I joined was a one-day event to redesign forms for patients with post-traumatic stress disorders. It was wonderful to design and patient test a real product (well-designed and simplified form) by the end of the day. In a different challenge, at Boston University, my team and I spent a whole week trying to understand the reason people were not engaged with existing health and awareness services located close to their homes. We conducted interviews and focus groups, and walked from the community center to people’s homes to learn more about them and their experiences. We later presented recommendations and suggested solutions to the community center, and our solutions were ultimately incorporated into the center’s actionable plans. The most recent challenge that I have joined is the MIT Grand Hack, which is the biggest hackathon in the world, with over 20 countries participating. The motivational vibes can be felt everywhere! I am glad to bring all these experiences to an even a bigger event, the UNLEASH Lab, and to challenge along with 129 countries, leveraging the knowledge and skills I have gained to co-create solutions with other talents. I am curious and excited to see how the UNLEASH Lab structure unleashes the talents among us and fosters innovation for a bigger impact on the whole world.
Twitter: @DrAlaaQari, Snapchat: ActiveDentist
