Patient Safety Technology Challenge Advisory Board Holds First Meeting

Imagine that you had the opportunity to build a safer healthcare system from scratch. What would you envision?

This is the question at the core of the upcoming Patient Safety Technology Challenge, launching this fall. The recently appointed advisory board for the Challenge met for the first time on June 21 to discuss the details of the upcoming two-part initiative, which will incorporate a competition and a virtual exhibit of the winning ideas. Members of the country's leading patient safety organizations and academic centers reviewed the components of the Challenge and provided input on key considerations to further refine the concept.

The Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), lead sponsor of the Challenge, will invite both student teams and collegiate teams (student and faculty) to pitch technological solutions to address the most common patient safety challenges facing health care today. The winners will then contribute toward a virtual exhibit that will serve as a window into the future of health care, planned for early 2023. The Challenge will encourage students to create interdisciplinary teams and collaborate across their schools—or even across universities—to come up with novel approaches to patient safety challenges. The collegiate teams will similarly unite faculty and students from within a university to re-envision health care with fresh ideas to improve safety.

Students are the future clinical and administrative leaders, leaders in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics and autonomous systems who will work for the leading tech companies across the globe, and this competition aims to catalyze their ideas and solutions for a better future. Aviation, oil, gas, nuclear power, and space tech industries have all rapidly developed and implemented innovative technologies, but health care is severely behind. COVID-19 further exposed the deficiencies in health care that have existed for decades, and data now validates that the pandemic exacerbated the rate of preventable patient harm. Some of the most successful national patient safety improvements such as central line-associated blood stream infections suffered significant setbacks.

Progress can be made when technological solutions are paired with the sociotechnical aspects of care, and the Challenge seeks to empower students and faculty to break through apathy and inaction to paint a picture of a safer healthcare system.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge would not be possible without the partnership of many of the nation's leading patient safety organizations and academic centers for technological advancement in health care, including:

• AcademyHealth
• Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
• Center for Lean Engagement & Research (CLEAR) at the University of California, Berkeley
• Center for Military Medicine Research (CMMR) at the University of Pittsburgh
• Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at Brigham and Women's Hospital
• HealthySimulation.com
• Innovation Works
• Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI)
• The Leapfrog Group
• MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare
• National Quality Forum (NQF)
• Partnership to Advance Responsible Technology (P.A.R.T.)
• Patient Safety Movement Foundation
• Pittsburgh Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation in Medical Imaging