Boston Children’s PEDIHacks will host a hackathon event, AI Imaging to Innovate for Inclusivity (AI^4), in September 2025.

Your challenge

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, albeit fictional, can prepare you for a real-life career in health care. In this competition, Boston Children’s Hospital’s marketing department is on the lookout for a marketing and communications consultant with the medical, clinical, communications, and generative imaging AI know-how to construct the best visual and text-based samples for a variety of messaging needs by departments and specialties at the hospital. Your assigned team has to get out its messages and reach goals, whether it’s internally to employees or outside of the hospital to potential employees, current and future patients, or the public.

Why participate

Participation in PEDIHacks will hopefully give you a greater understanding of career paths in health care informatics, an opportunity to interact with clinicians and professionals in the health care informatics field, and exposure to how generative AI can be used in health care communications.

Check your eligibility

Applicants must be enrolled in an undergraduate program of studies (full-time or part-time) at a college or university within 50 miles of the main campus of Boston Children’s Hospital, at 300 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA.

How teams are formed

Teams will be formed by the PEDIHacks organizers from among the students who apply, with every effort made to balance the diversity of experience among teams.

Each team will consist of four students. There will be a maximum of 80 students divided into 20 teams.

There will be five different problem groups; there will be four teams assigned to each of the problems.

Do you have the skills?

Ideally students will have proficiency in the following:

  • Building presentation decks in Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides
  • Word processing with Microsoft Word or Google Docs
  • Experience with generative imaging AI
  • Light graphic design capability (i.e., resizing/cropping images, moving images and text boxes, etc.)

What resources are available?

All teams will have access to generative AI tools to support image and text generation.

How will the hackathon play out?

Preliminary round

Teams will work on a problem and have just under two hours to come up with a communication piece and pitch deck. This round is longer than the competition round to allow for interaction and input from coaches and mentors.

Deliverables:

  • The communication piece
  • A pitch deck communicating why your team and AI-generated communication piece should win
  • Additional slides detailing the process used to create the communication piece

This round will allow teams to pitch to the judges as a practice round and get feedback you can use to improve your pitch for the competition round. It will also help your team get a handle on the technical and logistical components of the hackathon, including acclimating to the technology and submission workflow.

Competition round

Groups will work on a new but similar type of problem and will have just under 90 minutes to come up with a communication piece. Mentors and coaches will be available during this round as needed.

Deliverables:

  • The communication piece
  • A pitch deck communicating why your team and AI-generated communication piece should win

This round will be judged, and the winner of the round will be declared “Best in Proposal” for their problem and will move to the championship round. 

Championship round

The winner of the Best in Proposal round from each of the five problem groups will present their communication piece and pitch deck from the competition round to the broader AI^4 audience, which will vote for the winner. The champion’s work will be named “Best in Pitch.”

Requirements

To be considered for a AI^4 prize, teams must:

  • Attend the in-person competition event in its entirety.
  • Participate in the preliminary round and the competition round. If your team advances, then you must also compete in the championship round and remain for the awards ceremony. Awards will not be mailed.
  • Submit your communications piece and pitch deck at the end of each round so additional work cannot be done prior to pitching.
  • Create the image component of the communications piece using only the gen-AI tool through prompt engineering. The text can be generated by AI and/or edited by participants.

How you can prepare for the event

There will be a series of instructional content to help you prepare for the competition. The content will consist of videos and articles by experts and professionals in the fields of health care, medicine, and generative AI. You can learn and familiarize yourself with some of the knowledge that will be needed during the competition at your own pace ahead of the competition.