47 Students. 22 Live Healthcare Apps. One Week.

From August 3 to 8, 2026, something remarkable happened. Forty-seven high school students from the USA, Canada, Egypt and beyond spent six days building real software for real healthcare problems, and 22 teams shipped live, publicly accessible applications. The youngest builder was 13. One team was entirely seventh graders. Most had never shipped software before. Watch the full Demo Day, including every team presentation and the judges' commentary, below.

Where this began

The Healthcare Innovation Hackathon is the vision of our founder Deepti Bahel, a kidney transplant survivor who turned her own patient journey into a foundation that helps students build the healthcare tools she once needed. Alongside her, Ayushi Ajay Walia brought the product and partnership muscle that shaped a simple idea into a rigorous, global program. After navigating her father's major surgery when she was in sixth grade, Ayushi understood exactly why care gaps matter. I joined them to lead marketing and community engagement, and watching these two build this event from nothing has been the education of my life.

This was not a typical student hackathon. Every team had to name a specific patient, caregiver or clinician problem, justify it with a source, build and deploy a working app on Base44, pass an independent ArgosX security and accessibility scan, and defend the result in a recorded demo. Every single submitting team did all five. MediMate Foundation hosted, with WomenTech Network as co-organizer, promoting Demo Day to a community of more than 185,000 followers.

What the students built

More than half the projects came from lived experience. Our grand prize winner has lived with nephrotic syndrome since age two and built the food guidance tool he wished his family had in a grocery store aisle. Another student built around her own Hashimoto's diagnosis. One team built for a grandmother who needed physical therapy instructions translated into Tamil. These were not hypothetical user personas. These were their own lives.

Just as striking, teams volunteered constraints on their own AI. One group ran a deterministic crisis filter before any message reached the model. Another routed every AI extraction through a human confirmation screen. A third cut a finished AI feature after finding evidence the model was not reliable enough for that clinical judgment. High schoolers made those calls.

Congratulations to our winners

All six winning apps are live at medimate-hack-impact.base44.app/submissions. And to all 47 participants across the 22 teams that shipped and the 33 that registered: you built working healthcare software in six days. Certificates are on their way, and we hope this week was the beginning of something much longer.

Thank you to our judges

Twelve professionals gave our students the most valuable gift possible: they took their work seriously. Demo Day was scheduled for two hours and ran to three, and the panel stayed engaged the entire time. Thank you to Jennifer Moore, Tamara Miller-Villanueva, Promila Agarwal, August Radjoe, Shoba Rao, Jake Butler, Jeffery Halfon, Christina Cole, Sonia Chawdhary, Bobbie Reed, Abhinav Dangri and Carl Juresic.

“More than 20 teams of high-school students presented healthcare solutions they created, and I was genuinely blown away. What impressed me most wasn't simply that they used AI or learned a new platform. It was their imagination, empathy, and ability to turn meaningful problems into functional healthcare prototypes.” — Tamara Miller-Villanueva

“This generation is not lost. They are building. And they are building for us.”— Sonia Chawdhary

A special thank you to Mandeep Kaur Sanghera OBE, who delivered a keynote that set the tone for the whole event: innovation connected to empathy, integrity and impact.

Our mentors, sponsors and partners

Thirteen mentors stayed close to teams all week: Ayushi Ajay Walia, Samridhi Vats, Arjun Srinivasan, Abhinav Cheruvupally, Sharath Babu Ankenapally, Vanshika Thakkar, Kruti Hegde, Rohit Nagpal, Suha Tirmizi, Soham Kolhatkar, Sara McHugh-Grant, Pallavi Singh and Chandu Kongara. Students named them unprompted in their submissions, which tells you everything.

Seventeen sponsors and partners made the week possible. Base44 was the platform every app was built and deployed on, and the reason infrastructure disappeared so students could focus on healthcare. Nectura.ai provided AI-powered mentoring, and ArgosX held every team to an independent security and accessibility standard. Thank you also to Hive Networks, Accord Innovations, CyberEDX, IROC, Jajorae Consulting Services, She AI, Telle Whitney, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy, Shivani Chadha, Su Belangodu, Marc Coronel, Jennifer McKenzie MD, Sarabjeet Chugh and Abhinav Cheruvupally.

To the parents

You trusted your children onto unfamiliar tools and supported them through a full week of building. Several teams were sibling pairs. One parent told us her sons are still iterating on the judges' feedback, which is exactly the outcome we hoped for. This event does not happen without you.

What comes next

We are already carrying lessons into the next event, including captioned demos and live app exploration time for judges, and we intend to run this again in 2027, larger. If this week proved anything, it is that when you hand young people real tools, a real standard and real trust, they build things that matter.

Explore all 22 projects at medimate-hack-impact.base44.app.

With gratitude,
Perlyn Chugh
Founding VP, Growth Marketing and Community Engagement, MediMate Foundation