TreeHacks
Dr. Tang presents during a pre-hack workshop on patient safety technology.
Amanuensis won the BIG IDEA: Best Technology-Enabled Patient Safety Solution at this year’s TreeHacks. TreeHacks was held at Stanford University February 17-19 and gathered over 1,600 hackers from across the global. Paul Tang, MD, adjunct professor at the Clinical Excellence Research Center at Stanford University, served as the judge and held a workshop on patient safety technology at the start of the hackathon to help hackers understand the problem-solving mental model of physicians managing patient care as a basis for making care safer. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, funded by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, sponsored a $2,000 award to the top team. Over 20 teams competed for the prize.
The winning team, Amanuensis, is made up of Harvard University undergraduate students, Inaki Arango, Addea Gupta, Ayush Noori, and Smriti Somasundaram. The team recognized the issue physicians face in the volume and complexity of the current electronic health record (EHR) system and how this can lead to missed information, in turn resulting inmedical errors and adverse events. They also recognized the EHR industry is “ripe for disruption.” With those ideas in mind, the team created Amanuensis,an AI-enabled physician assistant that can automate clinical summarization and question generation. This tool has the potential to provide physicians with relevant insights and patient responses, leadingto more accurate diagnoses.
Team member Ayush Noori recognizes from personal experience as a caregiver to his grandmother the importance of a correct diagnosis and care. This spurred his passion to innovate. “As an aspiring physician-scientist, I seek to develop tools to support clinicians and healthcare providers. By leveraging advances in artificial intelligence to build automated physician assistants, ease the toll on doctors, and reduce medical errors, I endeavor to maximize the time other grandchildren have with their grandparents,” Noorisaid.
The Amanuensis team wowed judge Dr. Tang. Members of the team are continuing to work with Dr. Tang post-hackathon to explore the development and clinical deployment of AI-enabled physician assistants. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge is very excited to see the ideas that came out of TreeHacks and what comes next for Amanuensis.