DivHacks

Winning team members from MediTrack (left to right): Jalane Mendo, Samia Mayssan, Aizhan Tortayeva (photo provided by Columbia University)

DivHacks 2024 was hosted by Columbia University on October 5-6. The competition, which welcomed around 300 students from across the tri-state area, aimed to create a space that “reimagines what diversity should look like in the tech industry.” The primary goal of the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, to reduce preventable harm by medical error, aligned well with this year’s DivHacks theme, which was Tech for Social Good.

The winning team, MediTrack, included Jalane Mendo, Samia Mayssan, and Aizhan Tortayeva. They each received a Lululemon crossbody bag for their award-winning patient safety innovation. The team developed a medication related app called MediTrack that “aims to enhance patient safety by preventing medication errors, including drug interactions and incorrect dosages.” It does so by allowing a healthcare professional to verify if a prescribed medication is safe for a patient, given their age, sex, blood type, weight, height, allergies, vaccinations, current medications, and dosage guidelines. AI then determines whether the prescription is safe; if it isn’t safe, it will alert the clinician and provide an alternative solution. Aizhan shared her inspiration for the app based on her lived experience with incorrect treatments prescribed by a doctor, “which only worsened my condition and led to bacterial infections and allergies.” She believes MediTrack will “save time by eliminating the need to enter patient history manually each time for each hospital database and will help to reduce medical errors.”

In the future, the team plans to incorporate a feature that will separate medications with similar names or packaging to minimize confusion. Samia shared that the team is “thrilled to have participated in our first hackathon as freshmen and are incredibly proud to have won! This unique experience has inspired us to continue developing our app and we’re eager to attend more hackathons in the future. We would like to work on this solution as a startup.”

DivHacks organizer, Intellect Chen, noted the excitement the DivHacks organizing team had surrounding hosting the Patient Safety Technology Challenge again this year. She also pointed out that the event’s mentors, Linda Curley and Hamid Khosrowshahi, “did a fantastic job encouraging and inspiring hackers.” Additionally, Rosana Pineda Guzmán, who judged the event, “gave hackers fantastic advice on how to continue growing their projects.”