Four Patient Safety Awards Added to National Competitions

Four additional competitions are participating in the Patient Safety Technology Challenge funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and administered by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative: TreeHacks at Stanford University, Holloman Health Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington – Seattle, the International VR Healthcare Association's Patient Safety Technology Challenge, and the MIT Health Datathon.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge is designed to fuel the engagement of students and innovators in creating solutions and envisioning transformational approaches to reduce preventable harm from medical errors and reimagine a vastly safer healthcare system.

The new competitions will feature awards recognizing tech-enabled patient safety solutions.

TreeHacks, held February 17-19, is Stanford's premier hackathon and one of the largest hackathons in the nation, inviting over 1,000 students from across the globe to envision and build solutions, all in 36 hours. A $2,000 grand prize will be given to the team with the best tech-enabled solution. Holloman Health Innovation Challenge encourages undergraduate and graduate students from a Cascadia Corridor college or university to submit novel ideas that are reviewed by nearly 150 expert judges from the local life science community who provide feedback and choose award winners, including a $2,500 Patient Safety Tech prize.

International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association's (IVRHA) Patient Safety Technology Challenge will provide three cash prizes for the best entries around the FUTURIST: Patient Safety Transformation Award for envisioning a transformative approach for a safer healthcare system that disrupts legacy systems of who delivers what care, when, and how.

MIT Health Datathon, scheduled to be held May 18-19 in Cambridge, Mass., will showcase the value of harnessing the talent and perspectives of students from different disciplines and backgrounds in understanding patient safety from a health equity lens. Built on the principles of Open Science, Citizen Science, and Open Innovation, this datathon looks to reframe the issue of patient safety with stronger focus on health disparities, since treatment injuries disproportionately affect marginalized patient populations. The event will bring together students from underrepresented groups and professionals across several disciplines.

Learn more about these and other participating competitions here.