Last summer, a group of Rice University bioengineering students participated in the Co-Production Healthcare Innovation Program (CHIP), a groundbreaking initiative designed to bridge the gap between engineering design and real-world patient care. Through an eight-week immersive experience, the students observed complex clinical environments at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) and the Texas Heart Institute (THI), identifying unmet health care needs and exploring solutions with a human-centered approach.
“This collaboration brings together medical humanities, biomedical engineering and clinical practice in a way that allows us to design more inclusive and empathetic medical technologies,” said Kirsten Ostherr , director of Rice’s Medical Humanities Research Institute (MHRI). “By integrating diverse perspectives, we can better understand the human experience behind medical needs and create solutions that truly enhance patient care.”
CHIP, developed in partnership with Rice bioengineering faculty, MHRI, THI, TCH and Baylor College of Medicine, is supported by a five-year National Institutes of Health grant aimed at enhancing Rice’s undergraduate bioengineering curriculum. The initiative focuses on cultivating design principles to address health care inequities and improve patient outcomes. In addition to Ostherr and Sabia Abidi , an assistant teaching professor of bioengineering, the team overseeing the program includes Dr. Satid Thammasitboon and Dr. Khayri Shalhoub from TCH and Dr. Mehdi Razavi from THI.
“Working with these students is very refreshing,” Razavi said. “Their minds are still open and they see fresh perspectives that, frankly, even I have to watch out for after years of practice. They offer a different way of looking at things, and I learn more from them than they probably learn from me. They have courage. They stand for what’s right. They’ll call you out. I really love it.”
“Given the chance to conduct these hands-on observations allowed us to really see the patient side of these problems,” said senior Hamza Saeed, who is majoring in bioengineering and minoring in medical humanities. “Spending time in the clinical setting shows us the emotional impact and lifestyle consequences of health care technology.”
The program’s human-centered approach encourages students to observe health care environments and collaborate with clinicians, patients and their families to better understand the challenges they face. By bringing medical humanities together with engineering, students learn how to listen to patient stories as complex forms of evidence that can shape health outcomes but are often overlooked. Students then explore design solutions that address the root causes of these challenges, emphasizing simplicity, usability and patient-centered care.
“I encourage them not to only ask, ‘How can I solve this problem?’ but also, ‘How does this affect the patients and their experience?’” said Shalhoub, a pediatric cardiologist who guided students through the clinical immersion.
“Their focus on ethics and patient-centric care led them to ask very insightful questions,” Razavi added. “They see things from a fresh perspective that even experienced clinicians sometimes miss.”
Saeed along with fellow Rice bioengineering majors Sanjay Soni, Priyanka Subramanian, Andrew Sun and Karla Balleza worked on a project that focused on peritoneal dialysis, a form of dialysis that can be administered at home but requires patients to follow a rigorous aseptic technique to avoid infection.
“Physicians who believe their patients may be unable to execute aseptic technique in their homes will also hesitate to prescribe peritoneal dialysis,” Soni said during a presentation about the project. “This aseptic technique burden exacerbates health care disparities because those speaking non-English languages or living in low-resource or unclean settings are also less likely to understand the procedure and execute it without infection.”
The students observed firsthand how cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic factors emphasized in the medical humanities influence health care accessibility, highlighting the importance of designing medical devices that are adaptable to diverse patient needs.
“A key theme throughout our work was taking a humanistic perspective,” Soni said. “We were instructed to not think of solutions because it could bias us away from the most important task: making sure the problem is real.”
The program’s use of the co-production model was a transformative element that allowed students to identify the most pressing health care needs from a human-centered perspective.
“The co-production model gave the students extraordinary freedom to explore and validate unmet needs on their own initiative,” Abidi said. “It was about understanding the human experience and how that is contributing to obstacles in clinical environments.”
Students conducted interviews with health care professionals, patient families and multidisciplinary teams to understand the full scope of the challenges they were observing.
“The co-production aspect of the program was certainly appealing as it gave us a way to take ownership over our learning experience,” Saeed said.
By focusing on human-centered design, the program bridges the gap between technological solutions and real-world patient care. Students learned to balance technological innovation with practical, patient-centered considerations, emphasizing empathy and ethical decision-making.
“Our role is to guide them in integrating patient and provider feedback early by involving them in discussions with many stakeholders, which helps refine these ideas to be the simple, innovative, and practical solutions patients need,” Shalhoub said. “It’s not just about technical challenges but also about the ethical considerations behind them.”
“This is an opportunity to really understand what is the problem … not necessarily logistics but the human experience and challenges that you can’t teach in the classroom,” Abidi said. “You have to observe, listen, process and discuss repeatedly. Cultivating these skill sets was valuable.”
Working with the students has also influenced Razavi’s medical practice, challenging him to rethink his approach to patient care. He offered one example in which he forgot to speak to a patient after surgery. A student asked about it, reminding Razavi of how important it is for patients to see their physician after a procedure.
“Since then, I’ve made it a point to always see my patients after a procedure, and I now have patients tell me how much better they feel when they see me and hear directly from me,” Razavi said. “I’m just grateful to the students for bringing that up. That one little event really made a huge difference in my practice.”
Students said they found the experience to be transformative, influencing their career paths and perspectives on health care innovation.
“This was one of the most insightful experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” Soni said. “I had a perspective shift that has stayed with me to this day. This opportunity to explore and understand how medicine is practiced has given me a new lens to view my future work in bioengineering.”
By challenging students to observe and address real-world health care disparities, the program not only equips them with technical expertise but also empowers them to become empathetic innovators, showcasing how interdisciplinary collaboration and human-centered design can redefine bioengineering education.
“I think this kind of program gives them that exposure that is very important as you evolve into that field,” Shalhoub said. “I look forward to continuing to work with these students.”
“This is an opportunity to learn those skills and understand the human experience and how that is contributing to challenges in health care,” Abidi said. “Through this program, students ask the hard questions and decide the direction of future health care innovation, and that is powerful.”
Click here to learn more about the summer 2025 clinical immersion.