2013 Program Events

Site and Clinical visits from summer 2013

UCSF Parnassus visit — Visit to UCSF Parnassus medical center

The 2013 Berkeley Biodesign Immersion Experience (BIE) visited a number of clinical and site visits in order to conduct user needs research. The eight-week program was used to introduce undergraduate engineers, protégés, to the design process.

At site visits, presenters showed the students how their facility/product was addressing needs and allowed for students to explore. These visits included going and speaking with Dr. Anand Patel about his startup with ChemoFilter – including how he funded his project. The group traveled to UC Davis to watch Dr. Steffey perform surgery on a small dog at the Small Animal Clinic. The teams also visited the Garfield Innovation Center and were able to see how Kaiser Permanente thoroughly tested layout designs and different instruments before implementing them into the hospitals. Also, the teams met with engineers from Intuitive Surgical and learned how their team researched and tackle user and latent needs. They were also given the opportunity to try out the da Vinci surgical system. The team also traveled to Stanford and learned how the Stanford Life Flight operated.

The BIE program also made visits to many sites to observe the clinic operations and to search for needs. The group visited Dr. Edward Gerstenfeld at UCSF Parnassus with his work with catheter ablations. They were able to visualize a catheter ablation procedure and a left atrial appendage ligation (LAAL) surgery while sitting in the Cath Lab control room. The group also visited Dr. John Hixson at SFVA with his work with epilepsy. Two teams were able to see different procedures – one was able to see a WADA procedure done on 50 year old patient and the other was able to see videos of various types of seizures and learned how to identify what part of the brain the seizure began from. The group was able to watch Dr. Bethany Lipa and Dr. Que H. Nguyen and their work with electrodiagnostics for neuromuscular disease. They were able to see the doctors perform the procedures on patients and were able to test the EEG on themselves. In addition, the BIE team were allowed to sit in the surgery operating room with chief of general surgeon at UCSF, Dr. Hobart Harris – one team was able to watch the beginning of a Whipple surgery, and the other team was able to see a closure of an enterocutaneous fistula. The teams noted their observations about general procedures, latent needs, issues, comments, downfalls of procedures occurring at these clinical sites. From this, the BIE team created a database of over 300 user need statements from their findings.