January 10, 2023
Initiative co-hosts second annual Sacia Digital Health Innovation Workshop
Students from a variety of disciplines came together on November 19, 2022, in the University of Washington’s Hans Rosling Center for Population Health to make the second annual Sacia Digital Health Innovation Workshop an exciting and engaging day of activities. The event, which sought to offer students an immersive and hands-on opportunity to workshop new solutions in the growing and dynamic field of digital health, was led by the Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship in partnership with the Population Health Initiative.
“Our goal for the workshop was to bring together students with different backgrounds and experiences to tackle some of these large, grand challenges in healthcare, and it was both inspiring and energizing to hear such innovative solutions being pitched by teams that had just met,” said organizer Jessica Roberto, assistant director at the Buerk Center and the manager of the Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge student competition.
After generating initial ideas within small groups, participating UW students heard from the Director of Technology Development at the Institute of Translational Health Sciences, Teddy Johnson. He spoke on the importance of customer discovery and identifying stakeholders to help further refine their innovations. Groups then had the opportunity to hear from a panel of industry experts on how to demonstrate value with digital health products. The panelists, who included representatives from UW Medicine, Seattle-based digital care startup Xealth, and the Providence Digital Innovation Group, addressed crucial questions about how different entities within the healthcare system evaluate new innovations and gave advice on how to “break through the noise.”
The workshop concluded with a lightning-pitch round where students shared their innovations with stakeholders and members of the healthcare field. Experts from Providence Ventures, Modulla Health and Swedish Health Services offered real-world advice and feedback to the groups before deciding on a winning pitch. Notable innovations included a suicide prevention app for caregivers, an electronic medical records (EMR) platform to better address the healthcare needs of unhoused persons’, an efficient voice-to-text smartphone app for healthcare providers and a genetics-based decision tree integration to better personalize cancer care. The group who presented the EMR for those experiencing homelessness claimed the top spot for their innovation.
The workshop is an example of the types of events the Population Health Initiative is hosting in the Hans Rosling Center with the intent of fostering a space that catalyzes interdisciplinary collaboration to take on major population health-related challenges.
“We’re delighted to have been able to again partner with the Buerk Center to convene such an impressive group of students who were seeking entrepreneurial approaches to improve population health,” shared Arti Shah, the Population Health Initiative’s assistant director of strategic engagement. “Their collective work underscores the importance of having a range of disciplines at the table when seeking to make major advances in health and well-being.”
Please contact Shah if you are interested in partnering with the Population Health Initiative to host a workshop or convening.