<aside> 📣 Seeking Stanford research groups, faculty (CS342 / MED253 - Faculty Projects), and industry partners (CS342 / MED253 - Partnership Program) interested in participating in a Biodesign course to build and deploy digital health applications during the winter quarter. Engagement and commitment to implement the project beyond the quarter is expected.

</aside>

Dates Winter Quarter: January 5, 2026 through March 24, 2026
Course Schedule Preliminary: Wednesdays 3:30 PM - 6:20 PM
Course Instructors Oliver Aalami, MD
Carlos Guestrin, PhD
Vishnu Ravi, MD
Paul Schmiedmayer, PhD
Aydin Zahedivash, MD, MBA
Submission Deadline Submissions are closed.
Submission Instructions Submissions must be submitted to this form.
Feel free to reach out for questions or if you want to discuss your proposal with the course instructors.
Course Sponsors Mussallem Center for Biodesign, Stanford CS Department,
Stanford Technology & Digital Solutions (TDS)
Syllabus ‣

Stanford CS342 - Building for Digital Health is a project-based course for the winter quarter where Stanford CS students will build curated digital health projects mentored by professionals from Stanford University School of Medicine.

As a project partner you have the chance to pitch a project to the CS342 students and get a matched and balanced team of students working on your project that will build a minimum viable product (MVP) within the 10 week class. An MVP in our class typically consists of either a mobile or web application that includes 2-3 core features identified for the project that are must-haves.

Our expert instructors with experience in Health IT, clinical informatics, building digital health applications and will guide student teams and project partners throughout the process and will provide guidance and technical insights.

The selection process involves consideration of:

  1. Biodesign filter
  2. Project goal fully spec’d out in time to be built in the winter quarter by Stanford student teams (ranging from 3-5 members).

The selection committee will consist of members from Stanford Biodesign, the privacy office, the School of Medicine’s Chief Information Officer, and Stanford Hospital’s Chief Medical Information Officer, as well as Stanford’s Technology & Digital Solutions office. Having all the key stakeholders engaged from project selection to approval through implementation will help ensure timely and successful implementation.


Submission Requirements

Projects are being built using Stanford Spezi, Medplum, and other open source frameworks, and are generally expected to be developed as open-source projects. Industry partners may request to develop the application as a closed-source project as part of the CS342 / MED253 - Partnership Program. Any contributions to Stanford Spezi will be open-source and distributed under the MIT License.

Partnership Requirements

  1. Stanford faculty with authority and initiative to complete IRB approval and privacy office approval to be PI of the project (CS342 / MED253 - Faculty Projects) OR industry parter with a significant research interest (CS342 / MED253 - Partnership Program).
  2. Acknowledgement of the funding needs to launch and build the application within Stanford or in partnership with the Stanford Biodesign Digital Health group. We are collaborating with Stanford TDS/Research IT and Medplum. Generally speaking, hosting costs for production-grade digital health applications are about $500-800 per month, at discounted rates that we have negotiated on behalf of class participants.
  3. Commitment to contribute funding to provides students access to suitable computers for web application development, Apple MacBooks required for iOS mobile application development, CS342 teaching assistants, developer support, cloud hosting, and infrastructure during the 10-week course and the continued development of the Spezi open-source framework**CS342 / MED253 - Faculty Projects ($5k) or CS342 / MED253 - Partnership Program ($20k).**
  4. The output of the course is a minimally viable product, which might require further development based on your needs.
  5. Plan to deploy the project and continued involvement beyond the initial prototype developed in the course.

Selection Criteria