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Last week we officially launched the Edge Medicine Innovation Challenge, an open call for seed stage innovation to impact health at the Edge.
The room was electric with multi-discipline students, from Computational Precision Health, Translational Medicine, Engineering, MBAs, founders, and clinicians, who were passionate about increasing health care access.
Dr. Ida Sim, Edge Medicine team lead, opened with a question: what if the most important person on your care team was you? Wearables and AI now make it possible for patients to understand their health every day, and for doctors to see what happens between visits to take action accordingly.
The problem, Dr. Sim explained is that today's system is solving for the wrong thing with outsized effort reacting to chronic disease instead of preventing them. Today, billions of investment capital has flowed into technologies and solutions that treat single conditions, while most patients live with multiple co-morbid chronic conditions. Care needs to be solved for the whole person, not one diagnosis at a time.
Dr. Sunny Kishore, a primary care physician at UCSF and Senior Physician Advisor in Population Health at the UC Office of the President, made the current status quo of health care personal. He told the story of a patient who carefully logged blood pressure readings at home, only for that data to reach the care team months later. Then he shared a case from his clinic just weeks earlier: a young woman with diabetes who couldn't afford her insulin was found nearly unconscious by her roommate. Had she been found any later, she would have died. His point landed hard: clinicians are often flying blind, and with the tools we have today, patients should be visible between visits.
Dr. Fernando Pérez, IPython creator and Jupyter co-founder and Associate Professor in Statistics and Data Science at UC Berkeley, showed us the foundation healthcare needs to be built upon. JupyterHealth is part of Project Jupyter, supported by research groups, universities, and major companies through the Jupyter Foundation at the Linux Foundation. Because it's built in the open, it's free for anyone to use, deploy, and contribute to, and it can be shared, remixed, and scaled far beyond any single lab, company, or institution.
Today, most healthtech innovation has focused on single-disease solutions which has resulted in data silos. JupyterHealth flips those silos on their side, creating an open pipeline where data can flow from patient’s homes, to clinic, and back again. It works like a set of building blocks: flexible computing, connections to everything from mobile devices to health systems, privacy built in from the start, and tools that plug into the workflows clinicians already use.
As the evening moved into speed teaming, the energy in the room only grew. Multi-disciplinary students, founders, and clinicians had the chance to connect, share what they were interested in building and skills they brought to the table.
Interested in building with us?
Applications for the Edge Medicine Innovation Launch are now open! Form a team, bring an idea, and build with advising from the Edge Medicine leadership team. Finalists will pitch live at the Inaugural Pitch Event in February 2027, with prizes and visibility to match.
Learn more and apply to the Innovation Challenge by November 8, 2026.