BeachHacks
From left to right: Phil Martie (Judge), Kyle Duong, Ryan Wong, Rayne Desales, Morris Lam, Ariana Longley (Patient Safety Technology Challenge Project Manager) (photo provided by CalState, Long Beach)
California State University Long Beach hosted BeachHacks 2025 on March 22–23, welcoming student innovators from across the region to a weekend of collaboration and creativity. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge (PSTC) was a first-time supporter of the event, sponsoring a prize aimed at consumer-focused solutions to pressing patient safety issues.
Phil Martie, Founder and CEO of Nicolette, led an insightful "Patient Safety 101" workshop that unpacked the urgent challenges surrounding medical errors and patient safety, leading to robust conversation and sparking ideas among the 43 participants who had geared their projects toward consumer-centered patient safety solutions. Martie also judged the Patient Safety Technology Challenge and ultimately selected MedTrack as the winning team.
MedTrack team members, Kyle Duong, Ryan Wong, Rayne Desales, and Morris Lam, took home the PSTC-sponsored prize, Amazon gift cards worth a total of $750. Designed to help patients manage medications more effectively, MedTrack’s app helps users track prescriptions, manage symptoms, and avoid missed doses. "We wanted to build something meaningful, something that could actually help people,” said the MedTrack team. “That’s what pushed us to take on this project. We weren’t just focused on making it functional; we wanted it to be intuitive and easy to use.”
Sroth Sinha, one of the lead organizers of BeachHacks, reflected on the new partnership’s success, saying, “Partnering with the Patient Safety Technology Challenge opened up a whole new world for our participants, sparking creativity and dedication in ways we hadn't seen before.” He noted that roughly one third of the submitted projects were focused on patient safety. “That focus really inspired us. I’m genuinely grateful for the chance to work together on something so important and impactful.”
With a powerful new focus on health tech and patient advocacy, BeachHacks 2025 proved that the hackers involved view the competition as more than just an opportunity to build apps. For them, it’s about building meaningful tech-enabled solutions that can change lives.
