What began as a personal loss for graduate student Anushka Patel has grown into a tool that could better identify people at risk of developing sepsis.
Patel, a Master of Biomedical Innovation student and recent graduate of McMaster’s Honours Health Sciences program, is part of a team of McMaster students currently competing on the global stage through the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab Hackathon, a competition that challenges innovators around the world to design solutions that strengthen health systems.
The team is showcasing their AI-powered tool, EQUAL (Equity-Aware Quantitative Alerting Layer).
“EQUAL started in memory of my grandfather,” Patel says. A couple of years ago, he passed away from sepsis that developed unexpectedly after surgery.
“As we looked deeper, we saw a larger global challenge: Sepsis affects millions of people each year, which inspired us to focus on improving sepsis early warning systems.”
EQUAL leverages advanced clinical AI and aims to integrate with electronic health records to improve early detection of sepsis, an extreme response by the body to combat infections, particularly among people who are often missed by traditional screening tools.
Sepsis affects an estimated 49 million people worldwide and contributes to roughly 11 million deaths each year. The EQUAL platform is designed to act as an additional layer within hospital systems, identifying patients at high risk of sepsis by accounting for contextual factors that traditional detection models may overlook.
In simple terms, EQUAL aims to help hospitals recognize sepsis risk earlier and more fairly, Patel says.
“The problem we’re really addressing is that many sepsis screening tools rely on fixed thresholds, but these thresholds do not always account for things like patient context, including socioeconomic barriers, comorbidities, and other factors that might influence how deterioration appears.”
Advancing sepsis screening
Patel and her teammates — Abjot Basra, Rimzim Dhillon, and Muskaan Natt — began working on EQUAL in February.
A few months later, they competed in the first round of the Hackathon — a 48-hour marathon session at McMaster where they were pushed to take sepsis screening from a general idea and move it toward a clear solution.
“Over the weekend, we had the opportunity to pressure test that idea by speaking with many of the mentors that were present to help us,” Patel says.
“Discussions with our mentors helped us better understand limitations in existing sepsis alerts, particularly around false positives and variability between patients, which influenced the direction of our solution.”
EQUAL was named one of two winning teams at the McMaster hub of the Hackathon, earning an invitation to advance into Harvard’s Health Systems Innovation Lab Venture Incubation Program. They also took home the People’s Choice Award.
“Ideas alone aren’t enough; it’s about making them work in the real world” says mentor Anna Korol, assistant professor of Integrated Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences.
“In innovation, that means not jumping straight to building a solution but really taking the time to understand the problem and where current approaches are falling short.”
“The EQUAL team thought carefully about how their innovation would fit into clinical workflows, who would use it, and what it would take for it to actually be adopted and make a meaningful impact.”
The group is now proceeding through the next phase of the competition: a multi-week pitching process, where they will showcase EQUAL to judges and integrate their feedback.
If they’re successful, they will be invited to go to Boston for a demo day where they will pitch their project to investors.
“One of the key takeaways from the competition was learning to think beyond the technical solution itself and consider additional factors like implementation within hospital systems and whether it could be meaningfully adopted.”
Regardless of the competition’s outcome, Patel and her teammates believe in the potential of EQUAL, and plan to keep developing it and continue learning from feedback on it.
“We want to see if EQUAL can become something clinically and socially useful. This is definitely something that our team would love to continue moving forward.”