Innovating Healthcare Solutions:
First Annual Innovation Symposium
April 21st, 2012 1-3pm.
at UT Southwestern, D1.600
Background
Medical student education is in the midst of a paradigm shift. As medical students receive more exposure to the needs of underserved populations, they are becoming increasingly inspired to creatively tackle these complex problems. For a first or second year medical student, such a task can be daunting. Projects are often created based on broad assumptions with a lack of collaboration with communities on the ground, and the result of this is disheartening to both students and underserved communities.
To address this problem, in 2008, Dr. Aparna Ramanathan, then a second-year medical student, worked with Dr. Amit Shah, a faculty member at UT Southwestern and Amy Smith, a Mac-Arthur fellow and mechanical engineer at MIT to develop a medical student service learning elective class aimed at teaching students to successfully define and tackle large, complex problems. For the past four years, Innovating Healthcare Solutions (IHS) has taken students out of the classroom and into the community to work on real healthcare problems faced by the medically underserved.
This year, six current students joined the course leadership to expand upon the foundation that Dr. Ramanathan has laid. Together, they have guided sixty students in three tracks – global health, community health, and medical technology – working on twelve projects to address an identified medical need. These students will be presenting their novel solutions at the IHS First Annual Innovation Symposium to a panel composed of experts in these fields as well as established community partners seeking to implement these ideas.
Project Goals
Future Vision
We do not see the establishment of an Innovation Symposium as an endpoint, but rather as a first step to the accomplishment of larger goals, including:
Medical student education is in the midst of a paradigm shift. As medical students receive more exposure to the needs of underserved populations, they are becoming increasingly inspired to creatively tackle these complex problems. For a first or second year medical student, such a task can be daunting. Projects are often created based on broad assumptions with a lack of collaboration with communities on the ground, and the result of this is disheartening to both students and underserved communities.
To address this problem, in 2008, Dr. Aparna Ramanathan, then a second-year medical student, worked with Dr. Amit Shah, a faculty member at UT Southwestern and Amy Smith, a Mac-Arthur fellow and mechanical engineer at MIT to develop a medical student service learning elective class aimed at teaching students to successfully define and tackle large, complex problems. For the past four years, Innovating Healthcare Solutions (IHS) has taken students out of the classroom and into the community to work on real healthcare problems faced by the medically underserved.
This year, six current students joined the course leadership to expand upon the foundation that Dr. Ramanathan has laid. Together, they have guided sixty students in three tracks – global health, community health, and medical technology – working on twelve projects to address an identified medical need. These students will be presenting their novel solutions at the IHS First Annual Innovation Symposium to a panel composed of experts in these fields as well as established community partners seeking to implement these ideas.
Project Goals
- Create a forum for students to present their creative solutions to real heathcare problems facing underserved communities.
- Develop local and global networks of social entrepreneurs.
- Promote a culture of innovative thinking at UT Southwestern.
- Promote community development and empowerment of the medically underserved.
Future Vision
We do not see the establishment of an Innovation Symposium as an endpoint, but rather as a first step to the accomplishment of larger goals, including:
- Sustainable implementation of projects presented at the symposium.
- Expansion of the elective class and symposium to involve students and professionals from disciplines outside of the health sector.