Five 2024 Competitions Added to the Patient Safety Technology Challenge

Four new competitions and one returning competition, Bench to Bedside, have been added to the Patient Safety Technology Challenge for 2024. Funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and administered by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative (PRHI), 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.

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Foundation will host its annual CTA Foundation Pitch Competition at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 10, 2024. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge serves as a partner sponsor and will provide a prize of $2,000 for the best tech-enabled patient safety solution.

Last year PRHI supported Bench to Bedside (B2B) and were thrilled with the engagement of the students across Utah. B2B is a student-led health care innovation competition hosted by the University of Utah Health's Center for Medical Innovation. Multi-disciplinary student teams are invited to develop novel solutions to healthcare problems over a seven-month period. Teams work with university physicians, engineers, and business professionals to bring ideas from concept to creation, all while analyzing the patent landscape, determining a regulatory pathway, and developing a go-to-market strategy.

The B2B program is excited to, for the second year in a row, emphasize patient safety, allowing students to solve one of the five leading patient safety challenges facing health care delivery. The program kicked off in September and patient safety experts have been invited to the Networking with Experts events in November 2023 and February 2024 to ensure students have access to subject matter experts. The final submission date is March 24 and the B2B Competition Night will take place at the Utah State Capital building in Salt Lake City on April 8, 2024.

The tenth anniversary of IDEA Hacks, the premier hardware-focused hackathon on the West Coast, will be hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Student Branch at UCLA, a professional student-run engineering organization. IDEA Hacks, a 36-hour event held on January 12-14, 2024, will provide hundreds of students from both UCLA and local universities and community colleges with the opportunity to develop their own tangible products. This year's theme "Celebrating Our Communities" will encourage students to embrace their unique backgrounds and create something that will improve or benefit their communities, surroundings, and environments. There will be a separate focus on patient safety where students are encouraged to create devices that help to reduce preventable harm from medical errors. This track will be integrated into any of their existing tracks, and exemplary projects will be awarded an additional prize by their judges.

IrvineHacks 2024 is Orange County's largest collegiate hackathon taking place from January 26th-28 at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Hosted by Hack at UCI and in its tenth iteration, this event provides hackers with the opportunity to develop groundbreaking technical projects, network with well-known sponsors, engage in inspirational workshops from student organizations, and partake in social events. This year, Hack at UCI has partnered with PRHI to host a special prize category called the Patient Safety Technology Challenge.

The 2024 Cornell Health Hackathon is an in-person interdisciplinary event in New York City that will bring together students from across degrees, majors, and schools. Weill Cornell Medicine reaches out to invite local students, for example, those from New York Presbyterian, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mt. Sinai, Rockefeller Medical School, Hunter College Medical School, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NYU, and Columbia. The event will take place from March 8-10, 2024. The theme of the entire event this year will be patient safety tech. On Friday evening, teams comprised of medical, business, engineering, data science, developers, and design students will create solutions to improve patient safety. On Saturday, mentors will provide feedback and guidance to teams. On Sunday, the hackathon culminates in a project showcase to an audience of peers, mentors, and sponsors. A panel of judges selects winners and awards $10,000 to the winning teams.

Learn more about these competitions here.