Engineer’s Choice

Advancing Health Informatics

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez,

Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria
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Challenge Introduction
Advancing Health Informatics
● Health information systems are vital for prompt patient care
○ Can be a matter of life-or-death
● Computer age has created need for reliable health systems
● Ultimate goals:
○ Increase medical efficiency
○ Better response to public health emergencies

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Historical Context
● 2016: Johns Hopkins University announced medical errors as the
third leading cause of death in the US

● 2017: MA-based company eClinicalWorks fined $155 million by

the federal government for selling faulty patient record software

○ Medication lists were error-prone

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Initial Proposal
Problems
● Need for a reliable network of health informatics
● Negligent dosing practices put patients at risk
● Catching errors is up to human judgement
Solution
● Create extension that would improve the dosing of Weight-based
medications

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Research
Initial findings
● Fixed dosing more prevalent out of convenience
○ Weight-based dosing is more appropriate
● Children at risk of receiving wrong doses of weight-sensitive
medication
New discoveries
● Systems leave catching errors to pharmacists fulfilling prescriptions
● Opioids are common among misprescribed medications

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Expert Guidance
● Professional at Growing Child Pediatrics (GCP)
● Largest issue: health software is unreliable
○ Subject to outages
○ Hard for users to learn
● Known cases of incorrect prescription dosages
○ Pre-made template based on patient BMI to create safe range
○ Pop-up if dose is out-of-range for doctor to double check

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Solution
● BMI-Dosing Extension (BDX)
○ Addition to preexisting health software
■ Easier sale
○ Simplistic design to shorten learning period
● Total real-world cost: $638,000
● Real-world development time: 1 year

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Cost Breakdown
● $510,000 → program
development

● $28,000 → marketing

● $100,000 → additional costs

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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Engineering Design Process

● Ask
○ Group goals
○ Potential obstacles
○ Possible areas of focus
■ Doctor-patient interactions
■ Record accessibility
■ Patient safety
● Imagine
○ Possible solutions
■ Patient healthcare app
■ Record collection software
■ BMI-based dosing
● Plan
○ Purpose of the program
○ Interface design
○ Real-world use
● Create
○ Shell to house prompts
○ Range-generation sequence
○ Extensive catch-system to prevent
system crashes

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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EDP: BDX Demonstration

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

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EDP: Improve
Active improvements Real-world considerations
● List of 1,000 medications to choose from ● Funding
● Units of measurement where needed ○ For-profit or non-profit
● Adjusting pop-up ○ Potential profit model

Future improvements ● Support costs

● Program expansion ● Cybersecurity

○ Cross-reference medications for ● Software compatibility

safety
● Cosmetic improvements

Sophia Cornish, Christian Deras-Rodriguez, Shelby Sanchez-Herrera & Diego Sarria

Questions?