JHF Sponsors Awards at Recent Hacking Event on AI Avenue in Pittsburgh
Type: News
Focus Area: Patient Safety
Nucleate Pittsburgh welcomes 200 trainees to Bakery Square's AI Avenue for BioHack 2024. Photo by Julia Sun.
On October 25-27 at Bakery Square, located on Pittsburgh’s AI Avenue, Nucleate Pittsburgh’s BioHack event showcased biotech and health tech innovation with JHF’s Patient Safety Technology Challenge as a primary sponsor.
Carolyn Byrnes, MPH, CPH, policy director at JHF, led the event’s Patient Safety 101 Workshop, introducing the topic of patient safety, the scope of the problem in the United States, and the need for technological innovation to improve the healthcare system and prevent harm. Byrnes also provided an overview of the five leading causes of harm (medication, patient care, infection, procedures/surgery, and diagnostic), along with patient stories to provide real-world examples. Participants in the hackathon needed to address one of the categories of harm to quality for the challenge.
Of the three competition tracks in the competition, the Health Tech and Bio Tech tracks were able to qualify for the Foundation’s Patient Safety Technology Award prizes. Judges were Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Robotics Institute Principal Researcher and Analyst Jieshi Chen and University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) Assistant Professor of Medicine Alex Sundermann, DrPH. The competition mentors were CMU Heinz College Professor Ari Lightman and Pitt Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics Richard Boyce, PhD.
The $1,500 first prize to MonitorMed, for its cutting-edge AI solution targeting early-stage disease monitoring. Two second-place winners received $500 each; they included a Duquesne University team working on JP Drain technology to improve post-surgical care, and RehaMove, which developed a solution aimed at enhancing rehabilitation mobility. These projects highlighted the transformative potential of biotech for health care in the Pittsburgh region.
In July, JHF and PRHI launched the inaugural Patient Safety Technology Challenge Grand Awards, offering $25,000 in prizes and the chance for finalists to pitch live in front of a live audience of innovators, investors, and consumers at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. Open to participants from past competitions (Sept 2022–June 2024), this challenge aims to drive tech-enabled patient safety innovations in health care. Details available here.