2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical engineering (BME) immersion programs aim to provide high-impact experiences to engineers-in-training, often to reinforce or augment engineering design skill development. Specifically, clinical immersion experiences can provide BME students a structured way to realize how engineering design theory can be applied in a practical setting [1]. Clinical immersion can also amplify aspects of BME design that may not be achieved solely in the classroom, such as user need identification or awareness of socioeconomic factors in healthcare [2]. Assessing how students identify user needs or report their awareness of socioeconomic factors in healthcare can be challenging. Thus, a need exists to develop and share evidence-based practices with BME educators, toward the development of student activities that provide effective ways to identify, reinforce, and monitor student learning after clinical immersion experiences.

Reflection and debriefing are two approaches that have been used with a variety of learners in clinical settings [3], [4]. Reflection is an approach used to evaluate how learners document their observations and conceptualize how they can implement in their design practice. Debriefing is another approach that can be used to review clinical immersion and collectively question assumptions when reflecting on lived experiences [5]. Informal debriefing, specifically, is a method that has been implemented in training nurses, educators, and medical professionals and is a documented way of providing constructive feedback during a clinical learning experience [5], [6]. Our work will describe how debriefing sessions following BME student clinical immersion experiences may provide a meaningful way to demonstrate the quality of user need identification and changes in student awareness of socioeconomic factors in healthcare.

Our seven-week clinical summer immersion program combines clinical rotations, multi-format instruction, and team-based design to build student design skills and awareness of socioeconomic factors in healthcare [2]. Alongside teaming and design activities, the first week of the program invites academic and medical professionals to lead discussions with students on the topics of US city and state demographics, the innerworkings of hospitals and clinics, and healthcare system structure and stakeholders. Following this, students rotate through different clinical settings for 4-5 weeks and then reconvene for a final week of reflection, debriefing, and designing in teams. This work in progress will share how we designed and implemented two activities to facilitate informal debriefing with our summer immersion students after they completed multiple weeks of clinical rotations. The first activity, a clinical immersion debrief, guided students through ten short, individual prompts (e.g., “most educational about society”, “I had no idea about”, or “most interesting procedure”). The second activity, a needs identification debrief, required students to list identified user needs, to categorize the needs based on anticipated engineering difficulty, and to recognize needs with socioeconomic factors to consider during design.

In four years (2021-2024), our clinical immersion program has included a total of forty-four undergraduate BME participants. Our work in progress will share findings from qualitative student responses, analyzed via thematic analysis [7], to both the clinical immersion debrief (n= 35 students completed) and the needs identification debrief (n = 44 students completed) activities. Our overall goal is to identify if our program participants surface economic and/or societal considerations when prompted to informally debrief after clinical immersion.

In summary, clinical immersion programs can contribute to student awareness by providing community-engaged experiences rich with discussion of health needs, disparities, and proposed actions. Employing informal debriefing methods, such as those used in medical professional training, may provide BME students with opportunities to demonstrate awareness of socially conscious design factors. Further, our findings may guide BME educators in the development of similar activities for engineers-in-training.

Work is approved by the [redacted] IRB Protocol 2024-619.