OSU Bio-Hack
OSU Bio-Hack winning team with their awards (Photo Credit: OSU Biomedical Engineering Society)
OSU Bio-Hack, hosted by Ohio State University's Biomedical Engineering Society, held its 5th annual event November 4-5. The theme of this year's hackathon was patient safety, with all 60 participating hackers tasked to create a tech-enabled solution. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, with funding from the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, sponsored OSU Bio-Hack.
The winning team was awarded $500 for their Concussion Evaluation Sharing Tool, designed to helped emergency medical services (EMS) teams responding to the scene of an accident, score concussions. The assessment could be done offline which made it especially useful for rural settings.
Yiyao Zhang, a computer science and mathematics student at OSU shared the inspiration behind the idea. “Limitations of current tools, such as the paper based SCAT6, highlighted the risks associated with medical errors and the urgent need for efficient patient handoffs” Zhang explained. Zhang continued, “Our project, the Concussion Evaluation Sharing Tool, aimed to bridge these gaps by leveraging technology to enhance communication and accuracy in concussion assessments. As the lead in software development, I was motivated by the potential to make a tangible impact in reducing medical errors and improving patient safety, especially in resource-limited settings like sports sidelines. This experience solidified my commitment to innovating healthcare solutions that prioritize patient well-being and safety.”
Tyler Beauregard, athletic trainer and health and rehabilitation science student at Ohio State University, shared that while, “the obvious solution to the concussion evaluation problem is the use of an electronic medical record to store and transfer the data as needed. Unfortunately, delivering care on a sideline means limited access to information technology. It is not uncommon to not have any access to the internet, even though a cell phone.” Beauregard continued, “so, we wanted to design a system to facilitate the transfer of concussion evaluations between providers that accounted for the unique barriers to delivering care on the sideline. We designed a web-app for the input and retrieval of standard concussion evaluations and hosted it on a raspberry pi computer. Raspberry pi’s are small, cheap, and can be powered with a power-brick. By configuring the raspberry pi to broadcast a wi-fi network, we allow any clinician to access the app from their smart phone or any other wi-fi connected device. The patient, themselves, then logs-in to provide access to their records.”
This idea uniquely addresses the patient safety needs of the situation. The device could also send a printout to the local emergency department to facilitate communication of the findings in the field. One judge, Kevin Jones, who works in Enterprise Architecture and Health Systems Informatics at OSU thought it was a simple but very effective tool and said “I was really impressed with the number of presentations that had a reasonably working prototype after only 24 hour.”