Needs Finding in Healthcare

BIOE 10SC

Are you on an engineering pathway and trying to decide if opportunities in healthcare might be of interest to you? Or are you committed to a career in medicine and eager to explore how to incorporate technology innovation into your plans? In either case, Needs Finding in Healthcare is the Sophomore College for you!

Several courses offered during the regular academic year provide students with the opportunity to understand healthcare problems and invent new technologies to address them. However, this is the only one that gives undergraduates the chance to directly observe the delivery of healthcare in the real world and identify important unmet needs for themselves.

Needs Finding in Healthcare is a Sophomore College course offered by Stanford Biodesign. We’re looking for students who are passionate about innovation and interested in how technology can be applied to help make healthcare better for patients everywhere. Over approximately three weeks, you’ll spend time:

Learning the fundamentals of the need-driven biodesign innovation process for health technology innovation
Practicing how to conduct observations and shadow care providers to identify compelling unmet health-related needs, and then performing observations in Stanford’s emergency department, operating rooms, and clinics
Conducting background research and interacting with physicians and patients to understand and prioritize needs you have been identified
Brainstorming and building early-stage prototypes to enhance your understanding of the unmet need and critical requirements for solving it

In addition, you’ll meet experienced innovators from the health technology field and explore different career pathways in this dynamic space. Join us if you want to make a difference at the intersection of medicine and engineering!

Important Logistics

Early in the summer, well before SoCo begins, students will need to work with Stanford Biodesign to gain medical clearance to perform observations in the Stanford Hospital and Clinics. This will involve completing required paperwork and submitting vaccination records (and getting new vaccines if necessary). Complete instructions and important deadlines will be provided upon acceptance into the course. There also will be a few hours of reading/pre-work so that we can prioritize hands-on projects work during class time.

Examples of Field Trips and Guest Speakers

Every student will get the chance to shadow care providers in Stanford Healthcare’s hospital, clinics, and emergency department. We also will visit the Goodman Simulation Center for an interactive “practice” exercise to help prepare you for your time in the clinical environment. Other field trips vary from year to year but may include, as an example, a visit to San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood to better understand how systemic and social determinants can affect people’s overall health and wellbeing.

Guest speakers vary from year to year, as well, but will include physicians and engineers from diverse backgrounds who have chosen entrepreneurial career paths related to health technology innovation. Additionally, all students will meet with Stanford Biodesign’s director, Josh Makower, who is a serial health technology innovator.

What Comes After SoCo?

After completing Needs Finding in Healthcare, students become part of the Stanford Biodesign family! We encourage you to participate in one or more of the many Biodesign classes open to undergraduates, as well as to attend our events which take place multiple times per year.

Meet the Instructors

Dan Azagury

Associate Professor of Surgery (General Surgery)
Director for Education, Biodesign Fellowship Program, Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign

Dan Azagury is the Section chief of Minimally Invasive and Bariatric Surgery at Stanford University. He is a minimally invasive surgeon and a health technology innovator with an international background.

Dr. Azagury is the Director of the Innovation Fellowship program at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign. He teaches multidisciplinary teams a process to identify important healthcare needs and develop novel health technologies to address them. He also teaches in multiple international medical innovation programs and co-directed the Japan Biodesign partnership program.

He is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine and serves as Medical Director for the Stanford Lifestyle and Weight Management Center as well as fellowship director for Minimally Invasive and Bariatric surgery.

Dr. Azagury graduated from medical school in Switzerland, and completed surgical residency at the Geneva University Hospital. Following his board certification, he undertook a research fellowship focusing on novel minimally invasive techniques at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He continued his time at the same institution and completed a clinical fellowship in bariatric and minimally invasive surgery. He then completed the Biodesign Innovation Fellowship at Stanford and co-founded Ciel Medical along with his Biodesign teammate Kate Garrett. Together they developed novel solutions for intubated patients in the ICU. Ciel Medical was acquired by Vyaire Medical in 2017.

His research focuses on multidisciplinary approaches to improving bariatric surgery outcomes as well as medical device innovation. He holds three patents and has published over 75 scientific articles and book chapters.

He speaks French, Spanish and English and loves living in the Bay Area with his wife and four children.

Lyn Denend

Director for Academic Programs, Stanford Biodesign
Lecturer, Stanford Medicine

I stumbled into the health technology innovation field, but now am passionate about how technology can be used to improve health and healthcare for people everywhere. After completing an MBA, I worked as a management consultant focusing on strategy and organizational change management projects for large companies. Eventually, to get off the road, I took a job at the Stanford GSB developing case studies and multimedia teaching materials in collaboration with faculty. That’s how I met the Stanford Biodesign team, who needed teaching materials for their fellowship and classes. Over the next few years, the class notes we developed grew into a textbook and video series that are now used around the world in both university and corporate programs. Now, I’m the director for academic programs at Stanford Biodesign, where I develop curriculum and teach undergraduate and graduate students who want to make a difference through health technology. Personally, I enjoy yoga, walking my dog, and spending time with people who are interesting, hardworking, and fun!

Ross Venook

Senior Lecturer of Bioengineering
Associate Director, Engineering, Stanford Biodesign

I am a Senior Lecturer in the Bioengineering department and I direct Engineering at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign. I co-lead three undergraduate courses at Stanford—an instrumentation lab (BIOE123) and an open-ended capstone design lab sequence (BIOE141A/B)—and I support a variety of other courses and run hands-on workshops in the areas of early-stage prototyping and systems engineering related to medical device innovation. I enjoy the unique challenges and constraints offered by biomedical engineering projects, and I delight in opportunities for collaborative learning in a problem-solving environment. An Electrical Engineer by training (Stanford BS, MS, PhD), I was an undergraduate on the Farm when the SoCo program started—though I did not get to participate. My graduate work focused on building and applying new types of MRI hardware for interventional and device-related uses. Following a Biodesign Innovation fellowship, I helped to start the MRI safety program at Boston Scientific Neuromodulation, and I was a technical lead for that R&D group for 15 years. I continued working across the MRI safety community to enable safe MRI access for patients with implanted medical devices. When not working on health technology innovation, I enjoy all types of outdoor activities around the Bay Area and beyond with family and friends.