2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

To fully embed engineers as clinicians into the clinical flow, it is important to prepare students with an engineering mindset to solve medical problems. Furthermore, to ensure effective translation of medical technologies, students need to be trained with product design classes with clear connection to regulatory science. Preparing medical professionals through a program where engineering and medicine curricula are blended into a cohesive whole would enable the imparting of skills to diagnose symptoms and treat patients simultaneously with the engineering know-how to invent and translate new technologies. In addition, curricular efficiencies will shorten total study duration to seven years, thereby reducing debt burden.

The "Physician Innovator Training Program (PITP)" within the University of California Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine and School of Engineering was designed and piloted in 2023 to introduce first and second year medical students to engineering topics with the goal of developing the next generation of physician innovators. To introduce students to innovation and engineering, the program developed a two-year elective course, "Foundations of Innovation & Engineering", that focused on the four main themes of the PITP as it relates to medicine: Identification, Ideation, Innovation, and Implementation. After taking the first part of their elective course, students are then asked to apply to PITP to continue the elective and participate in the UCI biomedical engineering undergraduate senior capstone program as project mentors. The 9-month capstone mentorship program allows them to work directly with engineering students, physician and engineering faculty, as well as industry representatives, to develop real-world novel solutions in healthcare. Upon completion of the elective and undergraduate capstone, PITP participants are then required to develop a multi-year capstone project that they present during their MS4 year. Lastly, they are encouraged to participate in the UCI Biomedical Engineering Masters of Engineering (MEng) program in between their third and fourth years of medical school, to further their engineering professional development.

The two-part elective of the PITP was designed to provide students with the core principles of innovation and foster an innovative mindset to identify unmet clinical needs, develop the tools to meet those needs, and take their solutions from IP to eventual IPO. The course leveraged the expertise of physicians and engineers actively involved in innovation at UCI. Each session began with a focused didactic component, followed by case-based discussions using examples of real clinical challenges and the solutions created. For some sessions in the Ideation theme, students performed hands-on training using tools such as Arduino, ChatGPT, and CAD. Given that this was the first offering of the course, student participation records, an IRB exempt approved feedback survey, and an application to participate in the full PITP was developed and analyzed to assess student interest and improve future offerings of the course as well as subsequent portions of the program.

In the first year offering of the elective course, a total of 37 students participated in the course in which they attended 8 engineering and innovation related seminars to prepare them for the technical and entrepreneurial requirements for innovation. Survey and attendance record results found that students were able to participate in almost all of the seminars offered, and students found them to be useful introductions to the current tools and technologies that exist. They also requested further short assignments prior to the seminars to help them connect what they learn to clinical settings to improve future offerings of the course. In addition, the participants were asked to apply to the PITP to take the second part of the elective as well as act as mentors in the undergraduate biomedical engineering senior capstone course to develop their own multi-year capstone project. Seventeen of these students applied for the PITP to continue the elective and participate in the senior capstone course, as well as the multi-year capstone project as part of the program. Five students were accepted as the first cohort to participate in the full PITP. Additionally, 8 of the applicants expressed an interest in performing the MEng program in between their MS3 and MS4 years regardless of entry. Survey results, attendance records, and application responses indicate that the program is highly desired by the medical students, although there were concerns with time and commitment responsibilities given the extensive training required for the program during medical school. The preliminary findings of this pilot program suggest that integration with the BME capstone program and elective courses that focus on innovation and engineering can be integrated within medical school curricula to train the next generation of physician innovators.