New Patient Safety Technology Challenge Award Winners Announced

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 and reimagine a vastly safer healthcare system. Five competitions that took place in Washington DC, Georgia, Alabama, Utah, and Massachusetts recently announced their winners.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge sponsored the International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association's Patient Safety Technology Challenge. The winning idea, a pilot to incorporate virtual reality (VR) guided breathing exercises for airway clearance for high-risk post-operative patients, came from a West Virginia University Medicine team. The second prize was given to the idea to use VR to train physicians how to place central line catheters to reduce central line-associated blood stream infections (CLABSI). The third prize went to University of Pennsylvania startup venture, Vital Sign for Well-Being, a VR-enabled, evidence-based, and personalized platform for reproductive and maternal mental health.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge partnered with Emory University's Goziueta Healthcare Association's 2040 Healthcare Futuring Competition on April 7, 2023. Teams were asked to envision a new, radically safer healthcare system. BioFuture brought home the top prize of $1,500 for their idea of creating integrated computational facilities to improving care through predictive modelling with team members from both Emory University and Georgia Tech. SW2 placed second and received a $1,000 prize for their tech-enabled system that reduce medication errors. Arjun Srinivasan, MD, deputy director for program improvement in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion Centers for Disease Control and Prevention served as a judge.

This year's Bench to Bedside, hosted by the University of Utah's Center for Medical Innovation, gave a $10,000 award sponsored by Patient Safety Technology Challenge for the best tech-enabled solution. The winner was Luke Suo, MD, MS, who is studying biomedical engineering at the University of Utah and is a recent graduate from the School of Medicine. Suo developed the Pegasus Safety Breakaway System which aims to reduce the risk of medical tubing complications through their novel solution of buffered safety breakaway tubing. Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative invited local judges David Classen, MD, Pascal Metrics' chief medical information officer and Michael Woodruff, MD, who formerly served as Intermountain Healthcare's chief patient experience officer to select the winning team.

The University of Alabama's Alabama Entrepreneurship Institute held the 2023 Edward K. Aldag Jr. Student Business Plan Competition on April 13 and 14. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge sponsored a new $2,500 prize for the best tech-enabled solution. The winners created NephSol Inc. which developed a brain blood flow monitor for dialysis patients that will provide real-time alerts and continuous monitoring designed to curb common risks that patients encounter during dialysis, including the risk of falls, stroke, cognitive decline, and tissue damage which can be identified earlier with their technology.

At this year's MIT Hacking Medicine's Grand Hack held April 20-23, 35 out of 42 teams competed for the Patient Safety prize. Octila Health won the $1,500 1st place prize for their app that will enable home patient monitoring and education for behavioral health patients to ensure the continuation of care. The $1,000 second place prize went to NexxStep Health that created a mobile based patient action plan to streamline delivery of care. Susan Haas, MD, Ariadne Labs' core faculty member in Safe Surgery Safe Systems program, Karen Boylan, RN, for Cheetah Medical's director of sales and clinical training, and Jack Rowe, MD, Agilon Health's senior medical director served as the judges.

Read about past competitions involved in the Patient Safety Technology Challenge at the Patient Safety Technology Challenge website.