d·HEALTH Barcelona: a pool of untapped business opportunities

Barcelona, March 24^th 2014 -. Among the 1,200 unmet clinical needs Design Health Barcelona (d·HEALTH Barcelona) Fellows have identified, more than 450 offer clear business opportunities (about 150 for each hospital partner).

“One of the greatest contributions of the program is that the analysis of the needs provides new products and business projects but also it improves the quality of medical care in hospitals, increases the competitiveness of the sector improving already existing technologies and encourages scientific research. All together they boost the efficiency of the healthcare system” says Jorge Juan Fernández, Head of Academics and E-Health & Health 2.0 Director at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu.

The set of observations made by the Fellows can be distributed as follows:

• 40% are unresolved clinical needs that provide opportunities for new business.
• 25% require a scientific breakthrough to become a real opportunity, ie they promote scientific research.
• 20% are ideas for optimizing products of medical technology companies already in the market.
• 15% are improvement opportunities for hospitals, mainly in the improvement of spaces and circuits, implementation of digital technologies and communication processes between patients and caregivers.

Some of the detected needs could be solved with small improvements in already existing technologies. For example, the introduction of a device in premature babies’ incubators that could allow parents see the evolution of their newborn 24 hours a day from anywhere. Other needs, such as the replacement of the lead used in anti-radiation vests, require the scientific discovery of new materials. The introduction of digital technologies is an area that offers many improvement opportunities to hospitals related with the user’s experience.

d·HEALTH Barcelona is a pioneering, eight months long, postgraduate program in which unmet medical needs identified during a clinical immersion stage[1] in three top hospitals in Barcelona are the base for innovations that respond to the demands of society.

In the first edition of the program, the twelve Fellows, coming from the United States, Germany, Italy and Spain, have worked in three multidisciplinary teams at the Hospital Clínic, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu and Institut Guttmann. The Fellows are currently prototyping possible solutions to solve the need they have selected and they will present their products to a panel of investors in September 2014. In addition, the three teams will qualify for a $200,000 prize to help the implementation and market access of their projects thanks to the agreement Biocat has signed with Alandra Medical Inc, a Mexican company specializing in the development of innovative medical devices.

Application period for the 2014-2015 edition of d·HEALTH Barcelona is open until April 15. The program is aimed at young graduates and PhDs in medicine, life sciences, engineering, design and business who wish to pursue entrepreneurship in the healthcare sector. The admission requirements are available in the following website (http://www.moebio.org/programs/d-health-barcelona/apply-now).

“To enroll in the d·HEALTH Barcelona program you need curiosity for learning, commitment with the team, and courage to lead the change" says Fellow Immaculada Herrero. “It gives you more than just classes, but real tools, leadership skills and confidence to work in a startup and in any sector. It is useful for anything you do in the future on both a personal and professional level” says the American Susan Feitoza. According to Markus Wilhelms “I never learned so much in such short time in my whole life!”

d·HEALTH Barcelona, which has been rated by Health StartUp Europe as one of the best accelerators in healthcare innovation in Europe, is inspired by the prestigious Stanford Biodesign Fellowship, KaosPilot and Exponential Medicine (Singularity University) program and it is the first training course in biodesign taught in our country. It is part of Moebio, the talent development initiative of Biocat, which includes various training programs to promote entrepreneurship and to respond to the current challenges in the healthcare sector from a global perspective.

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[1] Watch the vídeo about  the clinical immersion experience: https://vimeo.com/88350886