Patient Safety through a Health Equity Lens

The MIT Critical Datathon will showcase the value of harnessing the talent and perspectives of students from different disciplines and backgrounds in understanding Patient Safety from a Health Equity lens. Built on the principles of Open Science, Citizen Science, and Open Innovation, this datathon seeks to reframe the issue of patient safety with a stronger focus on health disparities, since treatment injuries disproportionately affect marginalized patient populations.

The event will bring together students from underrepresented groups and Health Equity investigators. To capture diverse perspectives, we will involve professionals across several disciplines:

• Physicians
• Nurses
• Pharmacists
• Social Workers
• Health Equity Researchers

The Challenge

Patients of color often have falsely elevated O₂ readings as a result of limitations in pulse oximetry performance across different ethnicities. Focusing on Patient Safety, the main challenge of this Datathon will be to create Correction Models for Pulse Oximetry that map SaO₂ from SpO₂ measurements.

The participating teams will be composed of High School students and Computer Science undergraduate students. Mentors who appreciate and understand Patient Safety will bring their unique perspectives, experience, and critical thinking to the table!

As we believe that only reproducible, transparent research can actually help advance the field, we share all our code in open-source. All the data preparation and team's code will be made available on GitHub.

Code Repository