Did you know, in 2015, one in twelve Oregon jobs was in the healthcare industry? Digital healthcare, a discipline with enormous potential to dramatically improve healthcare as we know it, is no longer an experiment or a novelty. It is a rapidly growing industry. Over the next ten years, digital healthcare solutions will change the way people take care of themselves, ultimately changing the ways they live and work.
The Health Technology Collaborative (HTC) is a local nonprofit aspiring to build a healthier world through digital innovation. A key factor in making this vision a reality is targeted outreach and education to create lifelong innovators. Early in 2019, HTC reached out to Saturday Academy to explore how we might collaborate. From those conversations, the idea for the Healthcare Challenge: Engineering & Design class emerged.
Deb Mrazek, an established Saturday Academy Instructor and expert on teaching the design process worked together with HTC has created a guided learning journey to harness the power of design and emerging technologies to design solutions for people living with chronic disease. Students will have the opportunity to work together, and with real people living with a chronic illness, to understand the current problems and available technologies, explore alternatives, ideate, create conceptual models and pitch their ideas. Through HTC, some teams may be invited to make working prototypes of the design beyond the workshop at HTC's Inventor Space.
This is a great opportunity to not only experience the design process, but see if creating a better healthcare solution might is a career path for you.