Winter Quarter – Academic Year 2025/2026
| **Instructors
Course Manager** | Oliver Aalami, MD Carlos Guestrin, PhD Vishnu Ravi, MD Paul Schmiedmayer, PhD Aydin Zahedivash, MD, MBA
Meghana Nerurkar | | --- | --- | | Contact | [email protected] | | Units | 3-4 units | | Day/Time | Wednesdays 3:30 PM - 6:20 PM | | Location | TBD
In person attendance is required! Zoom is offered as a backup for reasonable exceptions. | | Course Material | Canvas & GitHub |
As our world becomes more and more digitized, patients and their devices are generating streams of valuable data that can provide meaningful clinical insights. This digital health revolution provides great opportunities to design and validate new digital health concepts. Many groups within Stanford Medicine have promising ideas that are ripe for development, however, they lack the software engineering and healthcare compliance know-how to take them forward.
Building for Digital Health is a Biodesign course sponsored by the Stanford School of Medicine (SoM) and Stanford’s Computer Science (CS) department. Its goal is to provide CS students with the opportunity to apply their skills to real-world health technology development projects, while enabling SoM faculty to leverage these talented individuals to help advance their technology concepts toward patients. Both audiences will learn a repeatable approach for developing new digital health technologies and preparing to launch them in the market.
Over the course of ten weeks, students and faculty will work together to tackle a project and launch an app-enabled solution for research use. Every week, students will learn about digital health-development, sensor technologies, privacy, security, and more. In the final week of class, teams will present their final project to a panel of digital health experts.
Projects will be announced during the first week of class.
Digital Health Application Development
Learn about the unique challenges of developing software systems for clinical applications including patient- and provider-facing digital health tools. We will discuss data privacy and HIPAA compliance to keep data secure and address regulatory requirements for clinical software, including FDA guidance on digital health technologies and medical devices. The course covers design principles for usability, accessibility, and interoperability with healthcare standards such as HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).
Open Source + Using GitHub
Become familiar with using GitHub to manage software development projects. Learn how to contribute to open-source projects, collaborate on software, automatically test, and build high-quality systems. You will gain hands-on experience building compliant, scalable, and user-centered digital health applications that integrate wearable, electronic health record (EHR), and patient-generated data.