Three Patient Safety Technology Challenge Competitions Announce Winning Innovations

Reel Free team members Austin and Alex Pollock (middle left and middle right) are presented with a check with ASUio judge Dr. David Mayer, Director Emeritus, MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety, MedStar Health, and Sparky the Sun Devil, ASU’s mascot.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge announced the winners of IrvineHacks, Hacking Health at Columbia, and ASUio, sponsored events that took place since late-January on both coasts of the United States.

Meddit won the patient safety track for best tech-enabled patient safety solution at this year's IrvineHacks, held January 26-28 at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus. Awarded the best tech-enabled patient safety solution, Meddit provides exclusive and anonymous spaces for hospitals' medical communities to share their experiences around medical harm. Through Meddit, staff can be inspired to report errors rather than hide them and spread awareness of some of the most common medical errors to prevent other medical workers from committing the same mistakes in the future. Meddit team members included UCI students Alina Sheikh, Hanshal Dabbiru, Raviteja Tammana, and Rithwik Saikrishna Garapati. They each awarded a pair of AirPods Pro as their prize.

This year's Hacking Health, a healthcare hackathon, organized by the Columbia Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), took place at Columbia University on February 3-4. The overarching theme of the hackathon was patient safety with all students tasked to dream up ways of reducing patient harm. Patient Safety Technology Challenge awarded $2,000 worth of prizes to a total of six teams.

Anti-Sepsis received the grand prize for the "Best Patient Safety Hack" which was a set of luxury headphones for each member of the team. Anti-Sepsis created a health tracker device to assess a patient's sepsis susceptibility using standard sepsis testing metrics, including complete blood count, lactate level, and other biochemical markers. Based on the metrics, the device will provide patients with therapy and recovery plans on the screen. Team members include Siqi Wang, Xinya Shang, Huachen Shan, and Zhiheng Shi, all Columbia University students. The runner-up was Pharmany, a personalized patient drug portfolio generating drug-drug interaction reports for medical professionals. The all-Columbia team took home Bluetooth speakers. Four other teams took home prizes such as phone chargers and movie tickets for their innovative patient safety solutions.

Arizona State University's Innovation Open (ASUio) awards ceremony was held on February 9 on ASU's campus. Twenty-six finalists traveled from across the U.S. and abroad representing students from Arizona, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, and Rhode Island, as well as Germany, Austria, and the UK. Reel Free won the $10,0000 prize for the best tech-enabled patient safety solution. Reel Free team members Austin and Alex Pollock created a medical device that retracts 50-feet of oxygen tubing to prevent falls among supplemental oxygen users. The innovation was inspired by their grandfather who fell and broke his hip after tripping on his oxygen tubing.