Team-based Design to Address Rural Disparities in Healthcare - Project Summary/Abstract While rural health care disparities are becoming a clear national crisis, the unique challenges faced by rural Americans are rarely discussed in today’s engineering classroom. Close to 20% of the United States population live in rural communities and face issues that are less common than their urban counterparts. According to the CDC, rural communities are at risk for a higher percentage of excess deaths from the 5 leading causes of death (cancer, heart disease, CLRD, unintentional injury, and stroke). Technical engineering innovations have the potential to address rural disparities. But to do so, explicit efforts must be made to expose future engineers to the healthcare challenges faced by rural America today. The goal of this proposal is to address the lack of focus on rural healthcare disparities in engineering classrooms. We believe that immersing bioengineering student groups in rural communities and hospitals will promote the identification of innovative engineering design solutions that can address rural healthcare disparities, encourage some students to work with the communities to find long term solutions, and establish a curriculum that supports career paths that seek to address rural healthcare disparities. The first aim of this program is to enhance rural health co-creation through partnerships. We will establish a clinical immersion co-creation program for a subset of NU bioengineering students in Maine rural health care facilities. Teams of students will work with Maine track medical students and clinicians over the course of 6 weeks to identify design opportunities emphasizing the concept of co-creation. The second aim is to scale the capstone design program at Northeastern by establishing a team-based approach to integrating the broader NU bioengineering community into design for rural health. Recognizing that not all students can participate in the clinical immersion, the rural healthcare teams will create a compendium of rural healthcare needs to serve as design projects for the capstone bioengineering course, allowing up to 36 students per year to participate in rural engineering design. The final aim is to Establish a pathway for students to implement their solutions. We seek to avoid a “hit and run” problem, where students enter a community they seek to serve only to leave and not sustain the relationship and implement sustainable solutions. After completing capstone design, students will have the opportunity to enter a one-year Roux Institute startup residency program that connects early- stage businesses to resources and best practices from across the university’s global network, providing a platform for implementing solutions in Maine. We believe that the proposed approach will establish a model for not only distributing students throughout the Maine rural health care system for opportunity identification but the development of the relevant curriculum to support students in co-creation and innovative design for rural communities.
