Goizueta Healthcare Association Healthcare Futuring Competition
The BioFuture team, from left: Imran Shah, Rene Mata, judge Arjun Srinivasan, MD, and Leonardo Molinari.
BioFuture won the Goizueta Healthcare Association Healthcare Futuring Competition. Held at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School campus on April 7th, the competition asked Emory and Georgia Tech students to consider what U.S. healthcare looks like in 2040?
The competition uses the method of “futuring,” or scenario development, to push teams to focus on long-term goals, rather than short-term fixes. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge, funded by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative, was excited to be a partner and help provide an added focus on patient safety that the competition organizers hadn’t considered in previous years.
Teams of two to five individuals were asked how they would build a radically safer healthcare system by producing a vision of a new system that addresses the main categories of medical harm and incorporates new technology applications.
BioFuture, the winning team, believe the future of medicine is personalized, computational, quantitative, and interdisplinary. Team members René Mata, Imran Shah and Leonardo Molinari received a $1,500 prize for their idea for an integrated computational facility where clinical staff work in conjunction with multidisplinary teams focused on computational modeling work to improve care. Examples of their proposed technology include using digital teams in risk assessment and increasing personalized medicine.
The next step for the team is implementation of the advanced computational technologies they proposed during the competition.
“Each of us individually are working in this field during our graduate studies, and we hope that we can advance the current modeling approaches such that they can be used in a near real-time fashion directly in the clinic, by the physicians themselves. In the long term, we're already thinking of ways that our ideas can actually be implemented in the clinic, potentially in the form of a start-up company focused on developing computational technologies for cardiovascular diseases,” said Imran Shah, who is a biomedical engineering graduate student working on applying computational modeling technologies for advancing patient safety care in the context of cardiovascular diseases.
The BioFuture team thanked their advisors Emory’s Alessandro Veneziani, PhD and Georgia Tech’s Lakshmi Dasi, PhD, for their guidance and inspiration on predictive computational technologies for improving patient care.
The second-place team, SW2, Stein Wang and Stephanie Wong, produced a solution envisioning a better system to reduce medication errors; they were awarded $1,000.
There were four main methods to reduce errors, first diagnostics improvement by applying wearables and genetic sequencing to achieve precision personalized medicine. Then, 3D printed medication to improve treatment by increasing customization. The third is improvement of medication dispensing by utilizing robotic dispensing and drone delivery. Finally in monitoring, they proposed the application of wearables and the internet of things (IoT) to reduce errors. The team also envisioned pharmacists playing a role in medication customization and digital therapeutic program counselling.
“My passion for healthcare innovation has led me to focus on the recent market trend of leveraging technology to minimize medical errors. I am excited to apply the knowledge and skills I have acquired to propose innovative solutions that create significant value throughout the medication value chain, while enhancing the patient journey through the integration of cutting-edge technologies,” Stephanie Wong said.
This competition inspired innovative ideas on harnessing current and future technology to make the healthcare system safer.
Arjun Srinivasan, MD, deputy director for program improvement in the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion Centers for Disease Control and Prevention served as a judge. He said, "It was both exciting and encouraging to see a new generation not only taking on the mantle of patient safety work, but also seeking ways to use new technologies to envision a safer healthcare system."