University of South Carolina Opens Health IT Innovation Lab
The University of South Carolina has opened an innovation lab to tackle healthcare problems through health IT innovation as well as artificial intelligence and robotics research.
Source: Thinkstock
- The University of South Carolina has opened an innovation lab in downtown Columbia to tackle healthcare problems through health IT innovation, artificial intelligence, and robotics research.
The university teamed with Siemens Healthineers to build the Innovation Think Tank (ITT) Lab, one of a number of ITT labs Siemens has opened around the world.
The Columbia-based lab provides facilities where researchers, faculty members, and students “can think outside the box” to develop technology for healthcare applications.
"Centers like this are so important because they bring technology and use it to create something new and do things differently. That involves opening your mind, moving yourself out of your comfort zone, innovative thinking, and collaborating," said Elizabeth Regan, chair of integrated IT at the university’s College of Engineering and Computing.
The lab will be able to share knowledge through Siemens Healthineers’ global ITT infrastructure with other locations in Germany, the United Kingdom, China, Turkey, India, and the United States.
"The ITT Lab will allow us to bring people together from a variety of disciplines to share their unique perspectives, which will stimulate innovation and help great ideas become reality," said Dilek Akgun, director of operations at the ITT Lab.
Siemens Healthineers' ITT Lab founder and director Sultan Haider is joining the University of South Carolina as an adjunct pressor to help with implementation of the lab.
"In addition to many new learning possibilities, the ITT lab's top participants will have the potential for receiving a variety of fellowships and internships with the Siemens Healthineers ITT lab global network," Haider said.
Neset Hikmet, a computer science professor who oversaw the lab's creation, said his vision for the lab is to host workshops with participants from various academic backgrounds and provide them with mentorship and resources to solve issues in healthcare.
"These are all opportunities that have participants getting out of their boundaries, meeting different people, and experiencing different cultures and ways of doing things," Hikmet said.
Coinciding with the lab opening, 20 participants from academic institutions such as South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Benedict College, and the University of Florida participated in a two-day Interdisciplinary Innovations in Healthcare Workshop. Participants were challenged to identify a problem in the healthcare industry and then develop and present a real-world solution to that problem.
