An Unpredictable Week

Hi everyone! My name is Hannah and I am a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where I studied Biomedical Engineering. I was born and raised in Belgium until I was 18 and some of my fondest and most challenging experiences stem from my travels. Even though the weeks leading up to the start of the GMI program have been full of emotions and uncertainties, I know that this next year will teach me about my personal/professional interests, strengths, likes and dislikes. My first blog entry will try to encompass this first unpredictable and exciting week. In the span of 7 days, our group went from polite introductions at bootcamp in Houston to tackling unmet medical needs in rural Costa Rica. This blog post will consist of four “mini” blog posts since each day presented an entirely new experience for me.

Pre-Costa Rica thoughts and feelings

Bootcamp really helped me begin to understand how our team would work together and where I might fit in as a member. Through several lectures focused on teamwork and personalities, I learned that some of my main strengths are (1) remaining calm under pressure, (2) being an active listener and (3) having a valuable amount of self-discipline in work environments. Discussing our Myers Briggs and Big 5 Personality assessments were not only a good ice breaker, but helped us understand how to best use different personalities in team settings. The lecture I found the most engaging was the Pre-Internship lecture. We were advised to establish an open dialogue with our boss early on, find a mentor for daily questions, set both personal and professional goals and fully define the project scope to ensure it is aligned with our boss’s and the company’s expectations. I anticipate referring back to this information consistently during my internship at Boston Scientific as Supplier Engineer. A big thank you to Dr. Van Kleeck, our main lecturer at bootcamp, for deepening our relationships before even stepping foot on the plane to San Jose!

Universidad Invenio and Liberia hospital visits

We dove right into work our first day in Costa Rica by driving 3 hours north of San Jose to Liberia. We visited Universidad Invenio and Liberia Hospital, both of which have a long-standing relationship with the GMI program at Rice. Everyone was so open and welcoming as we were the new team that would continue this cooperative and positive partnership. We mainly focused on the DialOasis implementation project whose goal is to allow for dialysis treatment to be safely done at home by the patient in order for the patient to have access to their daily life instead of spending their days in the hospital. We were introduced to the existing prototypes for this product at Universidad Invenio and had the opportunity to shadow/interview nephrologists and nurses at the Liberia hospital.

What stood out to me the most this day was how much my notebook changed within these 24 hours. Before this day, I spent so much time meticulously thinking about headers, color coding my notes and ensuring each word was positioned neatly on the line. This attitude was difficult to keep up with all the information being given to us. We had to jot down notes on the jerky bus during our debriefing meetings with Dr. Richardson and Dr. Clifton, the directors of the GMI program. We had to record our observations of the strengths, weaknesses and new improvements regarding the DialOasis prototype. We had to continuously record the unmet medical needs we observed during our time at the hospital. As you can see, not much time was available for neat note taking. Therefore, on the bus ride home my notebook was now full of scribbled diagrams, cryptic symbols and fragmented thoughts which I suppose (and hope) is the trademark of a good engineer.

Preparation for leading a 4-day long course in San Jose

Even though the prior day was very full, I felt that I learned the most when preparing for the course I will be helping lead on Monday. I felt I could really begin applying all the knowledge I’d received over the past few days about design thinking processes, formulating effective need statements and strengthening my observation skills during shadowing and interviewing healthcare professionals. Carolyne and I were assigned the medical topic of using traction therapy on metacarpal (hand) fractures to reduce healing complications. We will be team leaders for this medical need during the course. In order to prepare, we began researching the metacarpal physiology, stakeholders involved, current solutions, current technologies and applicable standards for our potential solution. During this process, we realized that we needed to shift our focus in order to have a larger impact on Costa Rican lifestyle and culture. Interestingly, the CAJA (public and free healthcare system in Costa Rica) will rarely pay for surgical intervention in hand breaks. Instead they place the hand in a splint, leading to ~37% of hand breaks having healing complications that could result in immobile fingers. In order to tackle this medical need, we changed our need statement (a statement to define what the medical problem is, who it affects and how to measure a positive outcome) to: A way to promote correct alignment of metacarpals in hand trauma patients without surgical intervention in order to eliminate healing complications.

I feel I am very motivated to learn due to the amount of independence and trust we have been granted so soon into the program. I am confident that we will further define our problem and design a valuable solution during the 4-day long course in San Jose next week.

Experiencing the classic Tico culture

Today we embraced the local culture of football games by watching the national team play (and win) against Northern Ireland. Costa Rica has already shown me and our GMI team nothing but friendliness and beauty and I cannot wait to continue fully immersing myself in the culture and language.

Final Thought 

There is an overwhelming sense of excitement, dedication and support within our group. I remember the “old GMI-ers” saying how close and supportive their group became. Every person’s success was felt and celebrated by the entire group. I have a good feeling that we will be following that GMI trend as well.

Hasta la proxima!