HackMIT & the Pitt Challenge Recognize Patient Safety Award Winners

The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative's (PRHI) Patient Safety Technology Challenge celebrated the completion of two more patient safety awards. As part of the Challenge, PRHI sponsored awards at HackMIT and The Pitt Challenge during October.

HackMIT 2022, one of the largest undergraduate hackathons in the world, was an intensive weekend-long event held October 1-2, gathering thousands of students from around the world to MIT's Cambridge, Massachusetts campus to use software and/or hardware project. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, with support from the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, sponsored the patient safety technology track which asked teams to think of a "Big Idea" to tackle a leading cause of harm in patient safety.

The teams were judged based on their demonstration of how their idea applies and solves a pressing patient safety issue. Judges included Jeffrey Rothschild, MD MPH, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medicine School and Dr. Patty Dukes.

Winning ideas included:

• TL;Dr, a project focusing on reducing medical harms associated with handoffs and discharges of patients through the standardizing automation that summarizes medical team notes and collating information from jargon-heavy medical team notes to allow patients to better understand their discharge summaries.
• Copy-cast, a technology-enabled exoskeleton that can mirror another person's hand movements. Health applications include to health include guiding surgeries and a mobility tool for patients to work on motor control.
• roaree, a platform for healthcare professionals to collaborate on machine-learning to patient solutions.

The Pitt Challenge on October 21-22 welcomed participants from across pharmacy, engineering, and design to engage in critical conversations regarding healthcare and pharmacy. Hosted by the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, the interdisciplinary hackathon was structured to help students solve some of the biggest challenges facing the world today.

Ten projects were submitted to the patient safety track, of which Pill Identifier was the winner of the the Patient Safety Technology Challenge-sponsored award, receiving $500. The Pill Identifier allows a user to take a picture or upload a file of a pill. In return, they receive information about which pill it most likely classified as from information in the group's data set. See the team's pitch and learn more about their project here.