Skip to main content
Medical Design Program
< Archived Sprint >

February 2026 Pilot

Eight fourth-year medical students spent 10 days using the Signal-to-Prototype Loop — combining clinical expertise, design thinking, and generative AI to build real healthcare tools. Starting with no coding experience, they shipped five production-quality applications: first as teams, then as individuals pursuing their own specialty interests. The February 2026 pilot was the inaugural Health Design Sprint.

“I didn't expect the AI to build something I could actually show a patient.”

— Danielle, Day 1
8
Students
10
Days
2
Teams
3
Guest Speakers
5+
App Versions

Team Projects

Team Project

FCM Companion

Clinical reasoning platform — differential diagnosis with AI feedback, session preparation dashboard, faculty analytics. Production app used by real students.

Research Pipeline

Journey Mapper & Product Lab

4-stage research-to-PRD pipeline — Evidence Wall, Product DNA Map, Budget Build, Design Philosophy. Turns user research into structured product requirements.

Individual Project

OSCE Prep Tool

Interactive case simulations with Socratic AI feedback. Transforms static OSCE PDFs into guided 10-minute practice sessions aligned to clinical competency rubrics.

Individual Project

Plan Ahead

Pre-session preparation dashboard consolidating fragmented resources into a calm, focused interface with case-specific history questions and PE planning.

Guest Speakers

Brittany Sigler

Bright Signal Consulting — Product Thinking & Individualization at Scale

How do you make a product feel personal and intentional for thousands of different users?

Learn more →

Justin Massa

Remix Partners — Jigs — Hardening AI Workflows

Making AI workflows reproducible and reliable. Moving beyond prototypes to systems that work every time.

Learn more →

Emanuel Moss

Intel Labs & UVA School of Data Science — Responsible AI — What It Actually Means

Research scientist studying responsible AI techniques, AI accountability, and sociotechnical systems.

Learn more →

Day by Day

Week 1 — Team Challenge-Area Apps

Week 2 — Solo Specialty Apps

Student Voices

“I didn't expect the AI to build something I could actually show a patient.”

— Danielle

“I've used UpToDate hundreds of times and never noticed how many clicks it takes to get to a dosing table.”

— Kevin

“Adding a color palette and font choice made the app feel like it belonged to someone.”

— Farah

“Writing a detailed feature spec for something I'd only vaguely imagined made the build dramatically better.”

— Derek

“Showing our app to someone outside the class and seeing them actually want to use it — that was the moment.”

— Maddie

“Going from pasting a PRD into Lovable to watching Claude Code read my actual codebase — that's a completely different thing.”

— Christopher

Outcomes

By the end of two weeks, every student had built and presented a working healthcare tool tailored to their clinical specialty. The course demonstrated that domain expertise, not coding ability, is the scarce resource in AI-assisted prototyping.

  • Both teams deployed working apps within two hours of starting on Day 1
  • Students discovered the Chat → Agent paradigm shift as a transformative moment
  • Cross-team testing produced genuinely useful feedback — not just polite reactions
  • Three guest speakers connected classroom concepts to industry practice

Teams

Team A — INOVA

Danielle Jones
Farah Kabir
Joselyne Tessa Tonleu
Magdalene Kwarteng

Team B — UVA Cville

Christopher Baiocco
Matthew Nguyen
Kevin Shannon
Derek Meyers