MedTech Innovation Hackathon 2025 Creates Collaboration and Innovation
The MedTech Innovation Hackathon 2025 was held October 24-25, 2025, at the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Building (ISEB) at UC Irvine, bringing together clinicians, engineers and innovators to collaborate and create solutions that transform patient care. The event was sponsored by the Master in Software Engineering (MSWE) program at UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS).
“Innovation is at the heart of the MSWE program, and this hackathon embodies that spirit,” says Mohammad Moshirpour, ICS informatics professor and hackathon organizer. “Bringing together our software engineering students with clinicians creates a multidisciplinary environment where students learn to collaborate across domains, rapidly prototype ideas, and turn real clinical challenges into meaningful software solutions.”
This year, 22 people participated. The two judges were Joe Rinehart, anesthesiologist and entrepreneur, and Gabriel Punsalan, co-founder and CEO of IVOS Medical. Projects ranged from follow-up for incidental radiology findings to auto generation of presurgical optimization.
Team PerryOps was the winning team for their project Preoperative Operations Assistant, an AI-powered system focused on pre-surgical optimization and smarter perioperative care. Team members included Master of Computer Science graduate students Het Dilip Patel, Anushka Dwivedi, Harit Nilesh Koladia, and Sakshi Kamal.
“We built an AI-powered pre-surgical assistant that helps clinicians optimize perioperative workflows,” explained Dwivedi via LinkedIn. “The system automatically parses unstructured Comprehensive Preoperative Clinic (CPC) reports and clinical guidelines, identifies deviations, and generates personalized patient reminders for tasks such as fasting, medication pauses, and pre-surgery preparation – all while keeping clinicians informed for review and approval.”
Kamal continued, “Once approved, the system generated personalized, timely push notifications for patients with pre-operative reminders – like pausing certain medications or fasting before surgery.”
“In short, we aimed to address one of healthcare’s most overlooked yet critical challenges: reducing surgical delays and cancellations caused by miscommunication and missed preparation steps,” said Dwivedi.
“What helped us stand out was the clarity of our workflow, a strong human-in-the-loop design, and a live demo that highlighted real clinical applicability,” explained Koladia via LinkedIn. “Grateful for the experience, collaboration, and recognition and excited to keep exploring how agentic AI can transform workflows and patient care in healthcare.”
“I joined simply for the experience, to learn, connect, and build something new,” shared Patel via LinkedIn. “Winning was an incredible bonus, but the real reward was realizing how much you can achieve when you simply show up and give your best…. If you are ever hesitating to try something new, go for it. You might surprise yourself.”
– Tonya Becerra