The next post in our symposium series (see: Part 1) focuses on student presentations related to healthcare and medicine. Each year, the MSL program enrolls students with academic and professional backgrounds in healthcare, medicine, and life sciences: students interested in attending medical school, clinicians including doctors, nurses and EMTs, medical scribes, professionals working in healthcare management, insurance, hospital administration, or consulting. The range of students in this area always leads to an interesting set of student presentations at our symposium including the three featured in this post.

Monica Weldon, a recent graduate from the part-time cohort, discusses health disparities resulting from approaches different states take to healthcare and preventative medicine. Her particular focus is on screening of newborns; her talk touches on consequential differences among the states and proposes solutions to bring all states to a more sane screening policy.

Vaidehi Patel, a recent full-time graduate, discusses the increase in healthcare fraud and abuse, describes the substantial costs of this increase, and looks at how such abuse might be prevented.

Spencer Stong’s presentation brings together two areas of MSL study: intellectual property and health & medicine. Spencer, a full-time graduate, talks about the difficulty inventors have in protecting intellectual property when developing diagnostic medical technologies.