Stanford
Graduate Students Capture Competition Hosted by UMD Smith School
COLLEGE
PARK, Md., April 26, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An online platform to
improve outcomes for sick babies by better engaging parents in their care drew
first place in the Innovate 4 Healthcare Challenge, a collegiate competition
based on radically improving healthcare through new processes that are enabled
by innovative information technology applications and supported by a sustainable
market strategy.
"NeoStream,"
developed by graduate students in the Biomedical Informatics Department in the
Stanford University School of Medicine, captured top-prize at the recent
Innovate 4 Healthcare IT Challenge hosted by Center for Health Information and
Decision Systems (CHIDS) at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School
of Business.
"The
challenge drew 26 high-quality solutions from a broad range of schools and
programs from across the country, and even a few from overseas, to answer the
call to how to strengthen patient-provider engagement to improve health
outcomes," said the competition's director Kenyon Crowley, Director of
Health Innovation at the UMD Center of Excellence in Health IT Research and
associate director of CHIDS. "The solutions were creative and most
importantly, they were derived from multi-disciplinary viewpoints ranging from
business and engineering to public health and medicine."
NeoStream
employs a social network approach, similar to Facebook, "to improve communication
between caregivers and the parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care
unit, with the ultimate goal of improving short and long term outcomes for
critically ill babies," said Stanford team member Jon Palma, a physician
and neonatal informatics specialist for Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at
Stanford and biomedical informatics student at the university.
The
Stanford team, that also included Hua Fan-Minogue, Ken Jung and Katie Planey,
was among eight finalists that presented projects to a judging panel of
industry, clinical, and government professionals, and academics, on April 20 at
the Smith School's center in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade
Center in Washington D.C. Their $20,000 first prize includes a potential venture
with challenge co-sponsor Johnson & Johnson Services Inc. "We're
excited about winning the competition, and the opportunity to work with Johnson
and Johnson to further our idea," said Palma.
A pair
of runner-up entries each netted $5,000, including "So They Can
Know," a Web application designed by Johns Hopkins University graduate
students for newly diagnosed STD patients to anonymously alert previous
partners; and the University of Georgia Terry School of Business team for its
"Play Hard, Live Long" game-based software that calculates lifestyle
variables to health-related outcomes.
Teams
from UMD plus Georgetown, Harvard and Carnegie Mellon Universities rounded out
the finalists, including Smith MBA students Akhil Singh and Daniel Tyler whose
"OptiMantra Health" entry proposed an application serving and
connecting CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) consumers and
providers. Additional support for the challenge was provided by The
Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Robert H. Smith School
of Business Healthcare Business Association.
CHIDS
Director Ritu Agarwal, professor and dean's chair of information systems, said
the competition epitomized her center's tripartite mission of research,
education, and outreach. "We drew teams from across the country that
worked very hard and energetically on the incredibly important problems of
fixing health care and reducing health care costs," she said. "They
spent a lot of time developing new ideas and figuring out whether these are
monetizable solutions. We believe entrepreneurship and innovation from
young minds is the way forward."
About
the Center for Health Information and Decision Systems
CHIDS
is an academic research center with collaboration with industry and federal,
state, and local government affiliates, and is designed to research, analyze,
and recommend solutions to challenges surrounding the introduction and
integration of information and decision technologies into the healthcare
system. CHIDS offers the benefit of a world-class research staff and
renowned scholars in the economic, social, behavioral, and managerial aspects
of technology implementation, adoption, assimilation, and return on investment.
CHIDS serves as a focal point for thought leadership around the topic of health
information and decision systems.
The
Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in
management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the
University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate,
full-time and part-time MBA, executive MBA, executive MS, PhD and executive
education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community.
The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning
locations in North America and Asia.
Contact: Greg Muraski
301-405-5283 gmuraski@rhsmith.umd.edu
SOURCE
Robert H. Smith School of Business
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