Driving community-centered medical device innovation via a longitudinal interdisciplinary immersion program - Project Summary Implicit bias is a well-documented contributor to healthcare disparities that lead to poorer health outcomes, higher infant mortality rates, and chronic disease in racial and ethnic minority populations. There exists a clear and critical need to reimagine how we approach engineering training to improve cultural competency and facilitate patient-centered, economical solutions accessible by all people regardless of race and socioeconomic status. Barriers to paradigm change are entrenched in the ways in which we equip clinicians to care for patients and train engineers to create solutions for clinicians. Our long-term goal is to establish an interdisciplinary, team-based approach for training engineers and clinicians to identify and address barriers to medical care and efficiency. The short-term objective of this proposal is to establish a two-year community-centered medical device innovation program that leads to creative, interdisciplinary problem-solving. The program foundation is supported by three specific aims. Aim 1. Establish a pedagogy that fosters creativity and flexibility in problem-solving of community-based medical needs through multidisciplinary clinician-engineering design teams. Aim 2. Emphasize impactful, financially sustainable, and commercializable solutions based on community need as a model for improving accessibility to care for historically marginalized groups. Aim 3. Improvement of recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented groups to increase the diversity of the biomedical engineering workforce pipeline. The program will recruit 75% of students from underrepresented groups in STEM. Design teams formed by engineering and nursing students will be exposed to the continuum of the design arc through community- centered, patient-centered needs finding, courses in medical device design and regulation as well as considerations for product development and entrepreneurship. Importantly, design teams interdisciplinary training focuses on identifying medical need through direct observation and immersion into the community medical system. The design and entrepreneurship experience of the students from problem identification to medical device commercialization will be supported by the biotech incubator Massachusetts Medical Device Development Center, a Medical Device Development Steering Committee, and the Center for Community Research and Engagement. The program’s effectiveness in training students to identify and address barriers to medical care and efficiency, learning of the material, changes in behavior, and program implementation will be assessed by the Center for Program Evaluation. The proposed program will immediately and directly impact the training and development of the biomedical engineering and nursing workforce through multi-disciplinary collaboration and clinical immersion to facilitate patient-centered design thinking.
