2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Clinical immersion as an experiential learning opportunity has been adopted by many biomedical engineering (BME) departments across the United States. These experiences vary in purpose and structure, but typically involve the immersion of undergraduate BME students in clinical environments to identify unmet needs and relevant stakeholders. The Clinical Immersion Program (CIP) at University of Illinois Chicago was established in 2014 and has evolved to introduce interdisciplinary teaming and even rudimentary development of concept solutions. However, unmet needs and/or concepts identified in our CIP were not consistently transitioned to subsequent design efforts. To address this limitation, we introduced an interdisciplinary “pipeline” approach between our undergraduate BME and co-curricular medical student innovation (Innovation Medicine, “IMED”) program to facilitate longitudinal and sustainable student-driven innovation beginning with needs identified in CIP. In part, this pipeline aligns CIP with our BME senior design sequence, such that thoroughly validated needs identified in CIP can be addressed by students in senior design. Accordingly, we revised CIP to incorporate the IDEO model of innovation, wherein projects were validated according to their desirability, feasibility, and viability. Desirability considers the users’ needs, where feasibility and viability reflect the technical ability to develop a solution and marketability potential, respectively. Teams are expected to propose a single unmet clinical need at the conclusion of CIP and validate it as a potential project according to IDEO model. Here we report on two years of our revised CIP, using data from pre- and post-program surveys. Surveys assessed student experience, confidence, and perceived necessity of interdisciplinary teaming, primary ethnographic research, and secondary research. Paired data from 28 students was available (14 BME, 14 IMED), who were placed in seven clinical departments (anesthesiology, cardiology, gastroenterology, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, pediatric surgery, and urology) between 2022 and 2023. Entering into the program, there was no significant difference in prior experience working with interdisciplinary teams or conducting needs identification between BME and IMED students (p≥0.14). Though IMED students were significantly more likely to have prior experience with technical and business secondary research (p≤0.02). Between paired pre- and post-program surveys, confidence with and perceived necessity of interdisciplinary teaming, needs identification, and secondary research (technical and business) increased significantly. At the conclusion of the program, participants were more confident with and perceived a greater necessity for needs identification, technical secondary research, and business secondary research compared to before the program (p≤0.02). From the post-program survey, all students reported that their confidence in using the IDEO model to validate a need/project trended towards strongly confident. The thorough validation of projects according to the IDEO model also aligns with the standard analysis for our institution’s technology transfer process, which represents a critical step in selecting the most appropriate projects for longitudinal development via the pipeline.