THE PEOPLE CLOSEST TO THE PROBLEM SHOULD HELP BUILD THE SOLUTION.
SONSIEL has been leading nurse hackathons since 2019, creating spaces where nurses can stop adapting to broken systems long enough to imagine, build and test something better.
We bring the innovation process directly to health systems, universities, professional organizations, conferences and partners, centering the knowledge of nurses, nursing students and midwives while opening the room to interdisciplinary collaboration.
Nurses already redesign healthcare every day.
They improvise when workflows fail. They notice friction before it appears in a dashboard. They see where communication breaks, where technology adds burden, where patients get lost and where a small change could transform an experience.
Too often, that knowledge remains informal, invisible or trapped inside workarounds.
A nurse hackathon changes the conditions. It gives people closest to healthcare's problems structured time, permission, methodology, collaborators and a path to do something with what they know.
Frontline knowledge is strategic knowledge.
The people experiencing a system every day can reveal opportunities that are difficult to see from a distance.
Innovation is a practice, not a title.
People do not need to identify as innovators before entering the room. The experience helps them discover the capability.
The room matters.
Nurses build differently when hierarchy softens, disciplines mix and experimentation is expected rather than discouraged.
This is not a coding contest. It is a problem-solving environment.
Hackathons came from technology, but nurse hackathons are not limited to software, engineers or people who already know what they want to build.
A prototype might be digital. It might also be a workflow, service, new care model, education approach, physical product, workforce intervention, communication tool or something nobody expected at the beginning.
The goal is not to force every challenge toward the same kind of answer. The goal is to create the conditions for better questions, unexpected collaboration and solutions grounded in real healthcare experience.
From “this isn't working” to “what if we built this?”
Every experience is customized, but the movement is familiar: understand the problem, build with others, make the idea tangible and create enough evidence to decide what should happen next.
Surface the problem.
Start with real friction, unmet needs, opportunities and experiences.
Go beneath the symptom.
Examine who is affected, what drives the challenge and what assumptions need to be tested.
Build the team.
Mix nursing knowledge with complementary perspectives and lived experience.
Make the idea visible.
Move beyond conversation into models, workflows, prototypes and testable concepts.
Challenge the solution.
Ask what is useful, feasible, ethical, sustainable and missing.
Make the case.
Explain the problem, solution, value and what is needed to keep moving.
We do not decide what the answer has to look like.
Healthcare challenges rarely fit neatly inside one discipline, one technology or one department. A SONSIEL hackathon creates a structured process without creating a cage around the solution.
A 56-hour experiment became innovation infrastructure.
SONSIEL began leading nurse hackathons during the organization's first year. What started as one in-person gathering became virtual programming, global collaboration, conference innovation sprints, funding pathways and organization-based experiences.
Before the platform, there was a room and a belief in nurses.
The question evolved from “Can nurses hack healthcare?” to “How do we embed this way of thinking?”
Not every organization needs the same hackathon.
The experience can be designed around organizational scale, participant population, strategic priorities, geography, available time and where your innovation culture is today.
What happens when innovation comes to the nurses?
Northwell Health partnered with Johnson & Johnson and SONSIEL for an immersive NurseHack4Health innovation experience designed to bring nursing voices directly into organizational problem-solving.
The experience engaged approximately 500 nurses, generated dozens of practical ideas and created new cross-functional collaboration while exploring how innovation methodologies could become part of nursing culture inside the health system.
More than an agenda and a room full of sticky notes.
SONSIEL brings years of experience convening nurse innovators and creating environments where frontline insight can become structured innovation activity. Every engagement is scoped around the organization rather than forced into a one-size-fits-all package.
Start with nursing. Then make the table bigger.
Nurse hackathons center nurses' knowledge and leadership without pretending nurses should solve complex healthcare problems alone. The strongest rooms connect nursing expertise with other perspectives needed to build and implement meaningful solutions.
Depending on the challenge, collaborators may include patients, caregivers, technologists, designers, researchers, operational leaders, engineers, educators, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and subject-matter experts.
A great hackathon should create more than a great weekend.
The real organizational opportunity begins when promising ideas are given a credible path forward. Depending on the solution and the organization, teams may need additional validation, prototyping, mentorship, internal sponsorship, implementation planning, incubation, acceleration or funding.
SONSIEL approaches hackathons as part of a broader innovation journey, not isolated theater.
One hackathon helped open the door to something much larger.
NurseHack4Health grew from the nurse hackathon movement into a broader global platform for nurse-led innovation, developed through collaboration among SONSIEL, Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft, with additional partners participating across its history.
Today, NurseHack4Health programming extends beyond hackathons to innovation sprints, learning experiences, acceleration and Pitch-A-Thon funding pathways.
It remains distinct from SONSIEL's customized Nurse Hackathon and Innovation Event services. Organizations can host a SONSIEL-designed experience without that engagement automatically becoming a NurseHack4Health program.
The solutions matter. So does what happens to the culture.
A hackathon can generate ideas, but organizations often discover something equally valuable: what becomes possible when people are given permission to think, collaborate and lead differently.
Surface frontline intelligence.
Hear directly from people closest to workflows, patients, systems and operational friction.
Build innovation capability.
Give participants practical experience with problem-solving, collaboration, experimentation and communicating solutions.
Break organizational silos.
Create new working relationships across roles, sites, specialties and disciplines.
Identify emerging innovators.
Discover nurses and colleagues who may not hold formal innovation titles but demonstrate curiosity, leadership and creative problem-solving.
Generate actionable next steps.
Move from broad challenges toward tangible concepts that can be evaluated, developed or implemented.
Signal that nurses are builders.
Demonstrate organizational belief that nurses should help design the systems, tools and experiences that shape healthcare.
What problem are your nurses ready to solve?
Whether you are a health system, university, nursing organization, professional association, conference or industry partner, SONSIEL can work with you to design a nurse-centered hackathon or innovation experience around the challenges that matter to your community.
Nurses do not need permission to see problems. They need pathways to build solutions.
Explore the broader SONSIEL ecosystem for nursing innovation, intrapreneurship, entrepreneurship, science and leadership.