Five New Competitions Added to Patient Safety Technology Challenge

Five competitions joined the Patient Safety Technology Challenge this month. Funded by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation and administered by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, 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.

Ohio State's Biomedical Engineering Society will be hosting its 5th annual Bio-Hack. The theme for this year's Bio-Hack focuses on patient safety. The event will be held at Ohio State University on November 4-5. The team who presents the best technology-enabled patient safety solution will win $500.

HackRPI X is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's 10th annual student-run intercollegiate hackathon. This year's theme is "Change the World" and the hackathon will be spotlighting the opportunity to improve the state of patient safety. HackRPI will be on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's campus on November 4-5 and the winning patient safety team will take home $1,000. Learn more here.

HackNJIT is the New Jersey Institute of Technology's 24-hour hackathon on campus, run by its ACM student chapter in conjunction with the Ying Wu College of Computing. Patient safety will be a new theme this year for students and the incentive to go for this track will be $400 to the team with the best idea. Learn more here.

Carnegie Mellon University's Hack-a-Startup is a two-week immersive experience for nurturing the beginning stages of CMU students' startups. There will be a special Patient Safety Technology Challenge award for healthcare startups that take on a patient safety issue – with a $500 prize. The kick-off will take place on campus October 28 and there will be workshops in the evenings from October 30 through November 10. November 11 is the final pitch day and award ceremony. Learn more about the event here.

University of Rochester's School of Medicine and Dentistry student entrepreneurs' group SMD Entrepreneurs is proud to partner with the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative to sponsor their first Patient Safety Technology Challenge. Prizes totaling $3,500 will be given out to the top three teams for their innovative ideas. Over a 4-week period starting on October 19, student innovators will work and meet with subject matter experts to develop solutions to address the critical areas necessary to improving patient safety in the US healthcare system. The final pitches and presentations will take place on November 16.