d·HEALTH Barcelona already has the first class of fellows

After a rigorous application process, Biocat has selected the 12 fellows who will start Design Health Barcelona program this fall. Coming from the US, Germany, Italy and Spain, these 12 students, with backgrounds in design, engineering, economics and biosciences, represent the first class in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program’s history, a select group of promising young health transformers.

During the application period, open from April 16th to June 24th, more than 200 people showed interest in Moebio’s flagship program, the training initiative of Biocat to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and professional development in the biomedical field.

"We are very pleased because we received candidates with very high profiles, researchers with several papers published in high impact factor journals, senior officials of pharmaceutical companies, young engineers who have developed telemedicine projects in the Amazon, etc. The selected fellows, all together, have 105 scientific publications, 6 patents and 18 professional awards," says Design Health Barcelona’s Head of Academics Jorge Juan Fernández and director of E-Health & Health 2.0 at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital. “We have conducted the selection process following the same standards of Stanford University. In the first phase candidates were evaluated based on the resume, the letters of recommendation, the essay and the video submitted. The 20 candidates with the highest score entered the second phase, consisting on personal interviews to decide the final 12 fellows that will attend the program.”

The first edition of Design Health Barcelona will start in September 16th and will last eight months. In the program, real needs from hospital settings will become the foundation for new technologies to improve quality of patient care. The program is inspired by the prestigious Stanford Biodesign Fellowship and by FutureMed at the demanding Singularity University and has the support of, among others, Kaos Pilot school (Denmark).

From September 2013 to June 2014, fellows will learn how to identify unmet clinical needs, design solutions and start up new, viable, business models, products and services. After an initial bootcamp the fellows, divided in three multidisciplinary teams, will experience a two months long clinical immersion at three main hospitals in Barcelona that are partners of the program: Hospital Clinic, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and Institute Guttmann. Here they will identify real unmet, needs. Then, fellows will design and prototype new products and services to solve them and, at the end of the program, they will pitch their innovations to a panel of investors to get the funding to implement them. Throughout the process, fellows will receive an intensive introduction to the chosen clinical area, will learn how to build a viable business and will receive training in areas such as design thinking or creative leadership through a series of classes and workshops taught by over 50 international experts.

d·HEALTH Barcelona has the support of leading companies in the pharmaceutical sector, including Sanofi, of consultant firms in the technology sector such as Accenture, as well as of public agencies such as AGAUR that have enabled Biocat to offer scholarships that cover 50% of tuition and, exceptionally, the 100% of the cost of the program.

The opening event of d·HEALTH Barcelona will take place on Friday, September 13, at 9:30 am at the Mobile World Center in Barcelona. Dr. Josep Amat, professor at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, will be the keynote speaker. He will talk about "Innovation from hospitals: experiences as an entrepreneur at the intersection of robotics and medicine."

More information:

Biocat:
Press Office • press@moebio.org
Zuberoa Marcos • 686 575 178
Mònica López  • 657 985 544
http://www.moebio.org/media
http://www.biocat.cat/en/press-room

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