Pitt and CMU’s "Night Shift" Advances to Round Two of #StatMadness

By Shilo Rea

Research led by the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC has advanced to the second round of the bracket-style tournament designed to pick the best ideas in biomedical science. The team, that includes Carnegie Mellon University’s Baruch Fischhoff, created a video game that improves doctors’ recognition and triage of severe trauma patients better than text-based learning.  

They beat Caltech in round one and now face-off against concussion research from Boston University.

It’s easy to vote now:

• Visit: http://bit.ly/upmcstat
• Scroll down to the UPMC/Pitt logo, near the bottom (bottom right on a desktop computer, second from the bottom on an iPhone)
• Click ‘vs’ or ‘vote’
• Click ‘vote’ under the UPMC/Pitt logo
• Visit and vote from multiple devices
• The deadline for round two voting is Thursday, March 8 at midnight

Night Shift was also a collaboration with Schell Games, a Pittsburgh-based educational and entertainment game development company that was founded by CMU’s Jesse Schell. The game is designed to tap into the intuitive cognitive processes that rely on pattern recognition and previous experience to make snap decisions using subconscious mental shortcuts – a process called heuristics.

“Deepika Mohan, a trauma surgeon at UPMC, came to me a few years ago. She was looking into the problem of inappropriate transfer decisions for patients and was looking for behavioral insights,” said Fischhoff, the Howard Heinz University Professor in the Institute for Politics and Strategy and Department of Engineering and Public Policy.

Fischhoff continued, “It is objectively hard to get better from everyday experience. Diagnostically difficult cases are rare. The feedback might come late, or not at all.  As a result, Deepika’s interventions try to simulate that experience, with the goal of improving the heuristics that physicians naturally use, even under the great pressure of emergency department service.”

Help spread the word on social media with #StatMadness2018 and http://bit.ly/upmcstat.

While you’re voting, consider also supporting the CMU College of Engineering team that created a handheld cancer diagnostic tool as they take on Washington University’s CRISPR-modified stem cells for chronic inflammation. 

Stat is a medical and health sciences news outlet.