DubHacks
Judge Dr. Yanling Yu (left), DubHacks volunteer, Pavan Kumar Komateedi (second to left), and Judge Rex Johnson (right), along with Vigil team members (left to right): Jonathan Shi, Prisha Patel, Yanni Hou. (photo provided by University of Washington)
DubHacks occurred on October 12-13 at University of Washington. The event drew almost 800 students from across the United States and Canada, representing a variety of majors.
Dr. Yanling Yu and Rex Johnson, ran a Patient Safety 101 workshop, mentored and judged the Patient Safety Technology Challenge at DubHacks. Yu and Johnson co-founded Washington Advocates for Patient Safety in honor of Dr. Yu’s father and all others who have been harmed and/or died from preventable medical errors. They are incredible advocates for safety and brought the patient and family perspective to the students. Yuna Kim, the event organizer, noted that the Patient Technology Safety Challenge “fueled a sense of purpose, pushing teams to think critically and collaborate with the goal of improving health outcomes.” She described partnering with the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative as “incredible generat[ing] a driving force for innovation in healthcare.” She also said, “it was inspiring to see how the importance of patient safety engaged our hackers, sparking creative solutions through cutting-edge technology that addressed real-world healthcare needs.”
A $1,000 cash prize was awarded to Vigil, the team that had the best patient safety idea. Vigil team members include Jonathan Shi, Prisha Patel, and Yanni Hou. Vigil is a mobile app that allows patients in hospitals or nursing homes to send requests to nurses, replacing the nurse call light. It has a patient portal, acting as a one-stop-shop for nurses.
Vigil team member, Jonathan Shi, drew on his family member’s hospitalization experience, as well as stakeholder interviews with CNAs at UW Medicine, to inform the creation of Vigil. He said, “after interviewing with multiple clinical nurse assistants, we found…clinical alarm systems like call lights were archaic and nowhere near robust enough,” resulting in patient negligence, particularly in under-resourced hospitals. Employing AWS Gen AI, the Vigil team created a “smart” clinical alarm system. Shi said, “the speech to text and text to speech interface acts as an AI health assistant (think health-focused Siri), where patients can simply speak their needs,” and the app then processes a request, categorizes it, and assigns a priority status to it based on other requests. This allows nurses to “easily see which requests to respond to first, reducing alarm fatigue and improving patient care efficiency.”
The nurse portal also shows additional information with each request, including a patient’s name, room number, a summary of their request, and a dropdown for patient notes. Another feature of the app allows nurses to track, manage, and organize related activities, including “their movements between rooms, delet[ing] completed call requests, and ensur[ing] that their patient's needs are taken care of.” Shi said that the Vigil team “received an immense amount of encouragement and validation from judges to continue working on Vigil and eventually launch a product for hospitals.”
