The cost of medical care is staggering in the U.S. The congressional budget office has stated that total spending was 16% of gross domestic product in 2007; it projects that without federal law changes it could be 25% in 2025 and 37% in 2050.[i] One way to hold down costs and maintain or enhance patient care is the development of more cost effective, safer medical devices. To meet this need, we must increase the number and the quality of bioengineers trained to identify and solve these problems and design solutions. To do so, our goal is to improve team-based design education to train our students to be biomedical engineers that can recognize clinical problems and design real patient solutions through a partnership between the College of Engineering and School of Biomedical Sciences at Rowan University and Cooper University Hospital.
The specific aims are to 1) Provide a summer training program using clinical mentorship and immersion at the Cooper University Hospital in Camden, NJ and 2) Leverage unmet clinical needs established at our medical school and local Camden care centers, provide new open-ended design projects in the Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Concentration with financial support.
The cost of medical care is staggering in the U.S. One way to hold down costs and maintain or enhance patient care is the development of more cost effective, safer medical devices. To meet this need, we must increase the number and the quality of bioengineers trained to identify and solve these problems and design healthcare solutions, which we plan to do in this proposed project.
