Three New Competitions Added to the Patient Safety Technology Challenge

Three new competitions have been added to the Patient Safety Technology Challenge for 2024. Funded by JHF and administered by 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.

Purdue University will host its annual Design & Innovation Challenge in West Lafayette, Indiana. This year introduces the category, 'Patient Safety' which is open to all Purdue students and presents participants with the challenge of addressing one of five patient safety issues prevalent in healthcare delivery, including medication errors, patient care, procedural and surgery errors, infections, and diagnostic error. Teams are tasked with developing a fully realized idea for a technology-enabled solution aimed at mitigating one of the five leading patient safety problems. The final presentation and winner announcement will be held on April 12th and April 26th, respectively. The registration deadline for Purdue students is April 7th, learn more here.

The second new participating competition, Big Ideas: A Data-Driven Innovation Competition, is an annual competition hosted by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and presented by the Healthcare Innovation Lab and the Institute for Informatics, Data Science and Biostatistics. In addition to the standard $50,000 Big Ideas grant, one team will receive a $10,000 award for the best tech-enabled patient safety solution. Letters of intent are due March 27, with the pitch event following on May 14th. The winners will be selected and notified on June 13th, learn more here.

This year's Hacking Health hackathon, organized by Columbia Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), will take place at Columbia University on February 3-4, 2024. They are expecting 300 participants, from Columbia and other colleges in the area, who will create hacks in small teams with assistance from mentors and peers. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge sponsored the patient safety track and will award a $2,000 prize to the "Best Patient Safety Hack." Learn more here.

Learn more about these competitions, and other related patient safety competitions here.