CHIDS Announces Student Finalists for Maryland Innovate 4 Health Challenge

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – May 14, 2015 - High School student teams from Montgomery, Howard and Prince George’s counties, plus students representing the University of Maryland and Prince George’s Community College, have been selected as finalists for the Maryland Innovate 4 Health Challenge. The teams will present their solutions and prototypes on Thursday, June 4, 2015, at the Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, as part of the Maryland Health IT Conference: Accelerating Technology Innovation.

The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) at UMD's Robert H. Smith School of Business has organized the challenge along with the Maryland Health Tech Coalition and MdBio Foundation, Inc.

The student finalists are vying for cash prizes in both high school and post-secondary categories totaling over $5,000. They will present market-ready solutions under the theme “Empowering Patients, Providers and Community with Creative plus Usable Solutions.” The high school competitors are:

• Rosanna Mensah, Kerri-ann Lewis and Ashley Acia from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George’s County and mentored by Kevin Strauss, co-chair of the Chesapeake Regional Tech Council and president of Family eJournal. The group’s entry, The Mensah, focuses on spinal health.
• Madisyn Steinberg, Hafeeza Mughal, Taylor Younkins, Narayani Wagle and Bianca Brade from River Hill High School in Howard County and mentored by Roxanne Zaghab, director of operations and business development at the Center for Innovative Pharmacy Solutions. Their entry, Farm2Family, focuses on nutrition tailored for disease prevention and management.
• Anurudh Ganesan from Clarksburg High School in Montgomery County and mentored by Sheila Weiss, Ph.D., chief science officer and vice president of research at DrugLogic, Inc. The entry, V1GOOD, focuses on innovative vaccine solutions.
• Tiger Zhang and Howard Sun from Richard Montgomery High School in Montgomery County and mentored by Sandeep Pulim, M.D., CMIO at Point of Care. The entry, The MI-System, focuses on medication literacy, safety and visualization.

Pulim also is mentoring Junaed Siddiqui, a UMD Ph.D. student in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health. His E-Puffin entry is a mobile app to eliminate pre-diabetes in kids.

Siddiqui’s competition, SAFI, focuses on pediatric oral hygiene and is developed by John Harlepas, Anthony Rozario and Melissa Marquez from Prince George’s Community College. The group is mentored by Lauren Weissbrod, regional business development manager at Synaptic Advisory Partners.

The competition is part of a wider EARN-supported initiative – dubbed “mHealth-focused Health Tech Strategic Industry Partnership (SIP)”– aimed at economic and workforce development in Maryland. This SIP’s programs, with industry partners, target Maryland healthcare workers, IT specialists, transitioning veterans and executives who play various roles important to fostering Maryland’s health technology ecosystem.

"mhealth is a promising area as these tools, when implemented effectively, can work to reverse the tendency for healthcare consumers to disengage from taking care of their own health outside of the clinic and relying on their doctors to tell them what to do," said CHIDS founding director Ritu Agarwal, Robert H. Smith Dean's Chair of Information Systems and department chair of Decision, Operations and Information Technologies, in a recent announcement of the broader initiative. 

“The students in the challenge, and not only the finalists, have impressed with their fresh takes on persistent problems facing the health and wellness of people everywhere,” ” said CHIDS Deputy Director Kenyon Crowley. “Sometimes it takes those unfamiliar with the traditional thinking of those entrenched in the field, to see novel and disruptive solutions.

“Matching these students with a great group of subject matter expert mentors is yielding some very interesting results, and hopefully motivating our next generation of health system problem solvers,” Crowley added.

The challenge is supported by Platinum Sponsor Wells Fargo, and Diamondback Sponsor CNSI. The project also is funded in part by the State of Maryland’s EARN Maryland Grant Program, administered by the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.

About CHIDS

The Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) is an academic research center based in the Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technology (DO&IT) at the Robert H. Smith School of Business that collaborates closely with industry, government, and other key health system stakeholders. CHIDS’ research seeks to understand how digital technologies can be more effectively deployed to address outcomes such as patient safety, healthcare quality, efficiency in healthcare delivery, and a reduction in health disparities. CHIDS offers the benefit of renowned scholars in healthcare analytics and modeling, technology innovation, adoption, implementation, innovation, and design. The pool of talent, knowledge and expertise in DO&IT is acknowledged by several publications as a top-5 performer in research production worldwide; the Information Systems group is ranked in the top-10 worldwide by Businessweek and U.S. News and World Report. CHIDS pioneers in the study of digitally enabled health system transformation and is widely known for its thought leadership and research collaborations.

About the Maryland Health IT Conference

The Maryland Health IT Conference, jointly hosted by the Maryland Health Tech Coalition and the Tech Council of Maryland, in collaboration with CHIDS, Howard Community College, Chesapeake Regional Tech Council, and the Howard Tech Council brings together leaders and innovators who are revolutionizing the healthcare delivery system. The conference presents the latest innovations, research, trends and big ideas that are shaping our digital healthcare ecosystem. Small businesses and budding entrepreneurs will have the unique opportunity to pitch ideas during a “Shark Tank”-style session. The conference will also include Maryland health tech firms exhibiting their solutions and career resources for health tech job seekers. Organizers thank Platinum Sponsor, Iron Bow Technologies, and Gold Sponsors, Social & Scientific Systems Inc. and GlobalNet Services, Inc. For more information, go to go.umd.edu/HIT15.

About MdBio Foundation

MdBio Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides innovative, effective and experiential STEM education opportunities. The Foundation’s interdisciplinary approach uses science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to explore real-world, problem-centric curriculum that bridges school, community, health and business. MdBio Foundation’s flagship education program MdBioLab, a mobile laboratory for high schools, has provided quality educational experiences to more than 110,000 students throughout the state of Maryland since its launch in 2003. The Foundation also operates other celebrated STEM education programs such as the Young Science Explorers Program for middle school students, the Maryland BioGENEius Award, and ATLAS: Advancing Tomorrow’s Leaders + STEM college and career symposia. For more information, visit www.mdbiofoundation.org.