Six Patient Safety Technology Challenge-Sponsored Events Announce Competition Winners
Type: News
Focus Area: Patient Safety
The Patient Safety Technology Challenge announced the winners of six recently sponsored events.
The 2024 Cornell Health Hackathon was an in-person event from March 8-10 in New York City that brought together students from across degrees, majors, and schools. Weill Cornell Medicine invited local students from New York University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and the City University of New York, chartering a bus to bring students from Cornell's campus upstate. The hackathon culminated in a project showcase to an audience of peers, mentors, and sponsors. A panel of judges including Frankie Hamilton, Hamid Khosrowshahi, Karen Santos, and Michael Wong selected winners and awarded $10,000 to five winning teams.
Current Care won the $3,000 Grand Prize for their device to prevent pressure ulcers through electrical muscle stimulation. Team members included: Antranig Baghdassarian, Leah Lackey, Andrew Lee, Brianna Leung, Johnson Liu, and Justin Liu. Team Rocket won the Best Use of AI Prize of $2,500 for their innovation, RocketHealth. Team members included: Sally Zhao, Stephanie Nguyen, An Tran, Khanh Do, Dany Alkurdi, and Ferdinand Gross. RocketHealth is a co-pilot for home health nurses. It works to counter adverse medical effects and provide medication reconciliation and automation.Cedar won the $2,500 Most Innovative Solution Prize for their Portable Ultrasound Imager for Carotid Artery Stenosis. Cedar team members included: Ethan Tse, Claire Zhang, Allen Dinh, Reem, and Danny Nguyen. Femnostics won the Most Market Ready Prize of $1,500 for addressing female reproductive health issues, specifically vaginal infections. Femnostics team members included: Antonia Li, Urmila Sehrawat, Bhavishya Agarwal, Edward Kim, Justin Xiang, and Rebecca Wang. IPVision won the $500 prize for the project with the most potential impact. Their idea was to transform intimate partner violence (IPV) healthcare by leveraging AI to detect cases and provide personalized treatment in acute care settings. Team members included: Lina Chihoub, Emily Leventhal, Raquel Castromonte, Mariam Rizvi, Elizabeth Madamitola,, and Keshika Gopinathan.
Utah's premier healthcare innovation competition, Bench to Bedside (B2B), hosted by the University of Utah Health's Center for Medical Innovation partnered with the Patient Safety Technology Challenge for the second year in a row to emphasize patient safety by encouraging students to solve one of the five leading patient safety challenges facing health care delivery with a prize of $10,000 offered to the team that developed the best tech-enabled solution. The program kicked off in September and patient safety experts were invited to "Networking with Experts" events in November 2023 and February 2024 to link students with subject matter experts. The final submission date was March 24, and the B2B Competition Night took place at the Utah State Capital building in Salt Lake City on April 8, 2024. Judges David Classen, Jason Funderburk, Jon White, and Mike Woodruff selected the winning team.
Clock Code won the $10,000 prize at B2B for their device to optimize care and communication among code team members in the setting of a cardiac arrest. This device aims to improve patient survival by improving communication. Team members included University of Utah students: Ziaul Karim, Josh Whiting, Diego Perez, and Alicia Du.
Healthcare Hackathon with AI (H2AI), hosted Georgetown University, was a 36-hour hackathon held April 12-14. H2AI invited clinicians, students, and industry partners in the DMV area (Washington DC, Maryland, Virginia). The $2,500 prize for the best innovation in patient safety was judged by Paulie Jesukiewicz, Maureen Robbins, and Jenna Williams-Bader. went to Nexuscare. NexusCare provides doctors with one-click access to geriatric research in their EHR system. Team members include Inara Jalisi, Molly Li, Mohammad Qader, Bradley Hu, and Javier Arana.
CatHacks, hosted by the University of Kentucky, held its 10th annual hackathon beginning April 12th. CatHacks is proud to be the first national college hackathon in the state of Kentucky. Karen Curtiss judged the event; MediCheck won the grand prize for the best tech-enabled patient safety solution and Dave the Passive Medical Assistant received 2nd prize. MediCheck created a system to augment and enhance drug selection safety by providing an additional check. Team members included: Matthew Wallen, Samyak Piya, and Aastha Bhatt.
LA Hacks, Southern California's largest hackathon with 1,000 students from across the country participating, was hosted by UCLA on April 19-21, the winning team received PS5s for each team member. The winning team MediBuddy was selected by judges Phil Martie and Onike Williams. MediBuddy leverages machine learning models, to analyze symptoms, body measurements, and more inputs by doctors to generate accurate, personalized suggestions on diagnoses and treatments based on previous case data. Team members included: Choidorj Bayarkhuu, primary frontend developer studying computer science at UCLA; Arnav Roy, primary backend logic developer, machine learning studying computer science at UCLA; Stanley Sha, backend Flask developer and presentation contributor studying computer science at UCI; and Emma Wu, data processing, secondary front-end developer, and presentation lead statistics and data science at UCLA.
Purdue University's Design and Innovation Competition finale took place on April 26, where three finalist teams were selected from a cohort of 11 to pitch and win a total of $4,000 in prize money. The three teams had 10 minutes to pitch their innovative tech-enabled patient safety solutions to a panel of diverse judges including nurses from the medtech industry, an anesthesiologist, and professors from Purdue representing technology leadership and innovation as well as industrial design. Judges recruited by PRHI included Joseph Anderson, Pamela Parker, and Heather Ball. The teams and their respective prizes were: Pillendar, a configurable pillbox that can provide cues to users based on their needs along with an accompanying app that acts as a mediator between patients and their healthcare team, which won $2,500; Scout, an innovative device to improve workflow efficiency during high-stress situations through the use of an intuitive hands-free vein visualizer, won $1,000; and Nebu, an innovative nebulizer for asthmatic patients that helps reduce the number of patients harmed from complications, won $500.
Congratulations to the winning teams and thank you to the organizers of the events for including the issue of patient safety as an option for innovators and entrepreneurs to address with their solutions. Read about past competitions involved in the Patient Safety Technology Challenge here.