Hack-A-Startup

Winning team, SafeRx, won the grand prize. (Photo courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University)

Hack-a-Startup is Carnegie Mellon University Swartz Center of Entrepreneurship’s two-week immersive experience encouraging students to create a start-up business on an accelerated timeframe. Saisri Akondi, a competitor in the healthcare space last year, organized Hack-a-Startup this year.

“Those two weeks helped me understand what I was headed towards, as an innovator. There are so many elements of building a company and Hack-a-Startup helped me realize that,” Akondi said.

Teams were incentivized by three general prizes for the best start-up ideas, and a fourth special prize was sponsored by the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, funded by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, to award the best tech-enabled patient safety solution. The event kicked off on October 28 with a workshop on patient safety. Several other workshops were offered from October 30 to November 10 to nurture the beginning stages of CMU students’ startups.

The winner of the patient safety prize was SafeRx. SafeRx recently also won the grand prize from hackAuton held on CMU’s campus. SafeRx team members included Amanda Manget, Charlie Sun, Matthew Pranata, Minh Tran, Archita Jain, and Mahati Manda. They focused on creating a mechanism for physicians to assess adverse drug reactions, before they occurred using natural language processing, computer vision, and AI models.

In Amanda Manget, a CMU master’s student majoring in integrated innovation for products and services, said, “Our concept was to integrate directly with EMRs to reduce alert fatigue and simultaneously prevent prescription errors at the time of prescription by clinicians in both acute and ambulatory care settings. By using LLMs [Large Learning Models] we could manage unstructured data inputs and also reference medical drug databases for up-to-date prescription science and guidance.”

Manget continued to share how the immervise experience enhanced their idea, “SafeRX was part of a two-week hackathon style pitch competition, where we explored how we can leverage AI, specifically LLMs to prevent prescription errors. Over the two-week competition, including two rounds of pitches, we dove deep into customer discovery to understand what the root cause of these prescription errors was, and where and how we could best intercept with a solution. We spoke to dozens of clinicians, pharmacists, nurses and subject-matter experts to do so, and developed a proof of concept.

"It was amazing to see what some of the teams accomplished in two weeks," Ari Lightman, Hack-a-Startup judge, shared at the conclusion of the CMU event.