Hacking Health

Team members of Anti-sepsis, the grand prize winner at Hacking Health. Pictured from left to right: ZhiHeng (Henry) Shi, Xinyi Shang, and Huachen Shan. Photo courtesy of Hacking Health.

This year’s Hacking Health, a healthcare hackathon organized by the Columbia Biomedical Engineering Society, took place at Columbia University on February 3-4. The overarching theme of the hackathon was patient safety, and all students were tasked to envision ways of reducing patient harm. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, with funding from the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, awarded $2,000 worth of prizes to six teams.

Linda Curley, RN, MSN, FNP, CNE-cl, CNE, CHSOS, assistant professor, clinical educator track and clinical learning coordinator in the Center for Clinical Learning, Rutgers School of Nursing, facilitated a Patient Safety 101 session and mentored students. Michael Wong, JD, founder and executive director, Physician-Patient Alliance for Health and Safety, served as a judge.

“All of the participants were extremely interested in patient safety, and Linda Curley and Michael Wong were able to provide great guidance to all of the participants about their projects and how they can cater to Patient Safety,” Monica Manmadkar, outreach and advertising lead for Hacking Health said.

Anti-Sepsis received the grand prize for the “Best Patient Safety Hack,” a set of luxury headphones for each member of the team. Anti-Sepsis created a health tracker device to judge a patient’s sepsis susceptibility using standard sepsis testing metrics including complete blood count, lactate level, and other biochemical markers. Based on the metrics, the device will provide patients with therapy and recovery plans. Team members include Siqi Wang, Xinyi Shang, Huachen Shan, and Zhiheng Shi, all Columbia University students.

Wang explained Anti-Sepsis' application is “driven by a robust data science model, and employs machine learning to diligently monitor patients' post-operative conditions with exceptional accuracy. This tool is meticulously crafted to swiftly identify early indicators of sepsis risk, a condition that, as per recent studies, contributes to nearly 30% of post-surgical fatalities. Often, symptoms dismissed as typical post-operative reactions—such as breathing difficulties, fever, and other side effects—can actually signal the onset of sepsis, posing risks akin to major diseases like cancer and heart disease.”

Shang, a biostatistics student, said the inspiration for the creation of Anti-Sepsis “stemmed from identifying a gap in patient education regarding post-surgical complications. Recognizing the challenge of effectively communicating risks to all patients, we developed a tool aimed at bridging this inequality gap, ensuring accessible and understandable health information for everyone.”

The runner-up was Pharmany, a personalized patient drug portfolio generating drug-drug interaction reports for medical professionals. The all-Columbia team each took home Bluetooth speakers as their prize.

Four other teams took home prizes such as phone chargers and movie tickets for their innovative patient safety solutions.  The Audience Choice winner was ExViva, an app to connect LGBTQ+ cancer patients with compassionate and competent healthcare services. The MayPro Prize winner was EyeCare, a medical device that can provide immediate ocular diagnostics and long-term eye training. The Data Science Track Prize winner was HeartED, an EHR-based risk calculator that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to fill in the blanks with patient notes. The Personalized Medicine Track Prize winner was Vitalis, a HemoCell-mesh to address chronic ulcers.

The Underserved Demographic Track Prize winner was Echo WayFinder. Echo Wayfinder team member, Pamela Grace shared, “The Echo Wayfinder uses echo location technology which uses sound waves to identify objects. Unlike competitor solutions, our solution has a voice recognition AI interface to identify and interrogate the object, and receive verbal commands for how to navigate around it.”

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge was excited to see all the ideas tackling pressing patient safety issues.