Novel Clinical Needs Finding Course Brings Biomedical Engineering Students Together with Regional Medical Campus Students, Residents, and Faculty to Solve Real-World Problems

Biomedical engineering is the fastest growing engineering field in the United States, preparing a generation of skilled problem-solvers who, together with healthcare professionals, drive the momentum of novel technologies for prevention, detection, treatment, and monitoring of disease. It is important to the education of biomedical engineers that the dialogue between healthcare professionals and schools of engineering is seamless, constant, and interactive. Lack of sustainable discourse between those who produce technologies and those who use them could reduce the applicability and relevance of the biomedical engineering education1,2. Reciprocally, for healthcare professionals to optimally harness the expertise of their engineering colleagues, a direct interaction is required. The department of Biomedical Engineering (BMEG) is one of the largest departments within the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas, with approximately 70 students graduating annually. Established in 2012, as the first and only biomedical engineering program in the state of Arkansas, the department is establishing itself as one of the premier research departments on campus. The department prides itself in its commitment to diversity and has been successful in attracting diverse groups of students to enter the field of science and engineering.  In the spring of 2018, the BMEG undergraduate student body had the highest percentage of female and underrepresented minorities within the college of engineering—53% female and 37% minority. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) is the only allopathic medical school in the state of Arkansas. In 2007, UAMS established UAMS-Northwest as a regional campus in Fayetteville. UAMS-Northwest extends UAMS’ medical education, research, and clinical mission. UAMS-Northwest has ~250 students in the colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and health professions, as well as 48 family medicine and internal medicine residents. UAMS-Northwest is located more than 200 miles from the main UAMS campus in Little Rock but is only one mile from Arkansas’ land grant university, the University of Arkansas. This proximity of the regional medical campus to the land grant university provides opportunities for collaboration that can benefit the students of both institutions. This article provides an overview of the implementation and preliminary assessment of a novel Clinical Needs Finding course that was recently instituted as a collaboration between the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences– Northwest Campus.